Ok so I have a ShuttlePC (SV25) and I swapped out the hard drive the other day and went to install windows, it got to a point where it rebooted and when came back up kept restarting the install. I did a google on it and people kept saying to run memtest86 on it, i did ran for 24 hours. no errors.. ran install again and this time it worked. I was then able to format my second partition on the new drive, and copy over my 30g music collection to it.. then it had locked up a little latter after that.. Now when ever I reboot it appears fine everything loads but soon as I open maxthon it reboots. If I open my computer it locks.. So I switched back to the original working hard drive and now same deal.. I downloaded the ultimate boot cd burnt it and ran that, every memory test i run seems fine, however any cpu one i run the screen goes black and the system is locked.. My question is how can i tell if its just the cpu or if its the motherboard? or do you think its something completely differnt? Thanks!!

Well, you could swap out the CPU, but you probably don't have one lying around. Not much other way to be sure that I can think of, though.

Just a few random suggestions in no particular order....

* In case of a bad contact, remove and re-seat as much as you can on the motherboard (DIMM, VGA, PCI cards etc.).

* If you have more than one memory module installed, try removing some and see if that makes a difference.

* Check that the CPU heatsink is getting warm and is making a good thermal contact with the CPU. If in doubt, buy a small tube of thermal grease from your local electronics store and clean/re-apply sparingly. Either way, give the heatsink a few gentle twists to bed it down.

* If the BIOS has a preset "Fail Safe" setting reset to those and see how it goes.

* Hooking up a spare PSU (even if it won't fit your case) might tell you that your PSU is marginal or failing.

I had a Shuttle SV25 and had similar sporadic stability issues until it just refused to boot at all. I will point you straight at the dreaded faulty capacitor problem.

I would completely disassemble the machine and take out the FV25 motherboard to have a close look at the capacitors. Some are likely to be a little swollen with raised tops - these are bad. Badcaps.net have more info.

Before replacing capacitors:


First boot after replacing capcitors:


I passed on that machine to my cousin and it is still working, even if it is ridiculously noisy by modern standards. If I remember it has a 1.26GHz PIII Tualatin processor in it with 1GB RAM, which makes it pretty nippy too.

Good luck!

First off thanks guys for the replies!
Hmmmm the 3 Big caps clustered near the CPU are kinda puffed up and even one of them has a pin head size of pink material sitcking out from the foil at the top.. I will check out that link at badcaps and go from there.. Thanks!

I talked with the guy at badcaps and he agrees that it is the cap problem that this board is supposidly well known for.. so I have taking it out of the case and am shipping it out to him tomorrow to have them replaced.. Thanks guys for the help!