To address some of the other comments, that exact CPU-mobo-memory configuration worked fine running Win2000 for many years, so I doubt it is the problem per se. Also, I did try the 1GB stick alone yesterday and it had similar symptoms as for 1.5 GB.
I do know where to look for a panic message and there is none.
About my running Win2000 on this hardware before, I would initially have thought that this made a hardware problem improbable, but I used to run the computer continually and I guess it's not impossible that there was a hardware degradation that was mitigated by the system staying warm all the time. The system was mothballed for a few months before my FreeBSD install, so the prolonged period at room temperature may have allowed some motherboard degradation to get worse. I was led to form that hypothesis because I noticed yesterday that there seems to be a relation with temperature: I ran burnP6 and crashme concurrently (both ran without problem with any memory configuration but I realize that neither of these two utilities necessarily stress the system in the way I need) and since they ran fine with the 1.5 GB in I tried to start KDE again (leaving the stress applications running) and it did bring everything up without rebooting. I stopped the system and let it cool down and KDE made the system reboot as before after a restart. I guess my next step will be to install chm or something like that to monitor the temperatures as the system runs, but anyway, it seems this is likely not a FreeBSD problem anymore, so I thank you all again for the suggestions and will continue troubleshooting the hardware. My immediate guess is either the CPU or motherboard.
Oh yeah, I still wonder thought why "memtest all" only seemed to "find" 512MB of RAM, but I think it is a side issue at this time.
Cheers,
Jean _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
