Overloaded CPU and dialup issues

[kahlil88]

Someone hired me to fix a computer that won't connect to the internet via dialup. I came to their house and was immediately able to connect. The computer froze at one point when I was plugging something in, and I decided to check that the cards were seated tight. After restarting, the computer didn't like the modem and refused to accept the driver it had been using. Eventually I gave up and installed a different modem and successfully connected to the internet once. I had to re-install Win2K because this thing was incredibly slow and infected with the W32.Sality.Q-1 virus. Every time I try to connect, I get a 678 or 721 error. Oddly enough, the CPU is constantly at 100% for some strange reason, even after a clean install with all drivers loaded, and I think the hard drive is going bad because it took several hours to install Win2K. Could there be any correlation between these issues? I'm at my wit's end with this hunk of junk!

[puntoMX]

Buy some better junk for less on eBay?

When you started with your post the first that came up that the whole network subsystem got messed up, but you already knew that and you reinstalled, you even changed the modem so it would connect to the net again. I would pull out that modem and see if the CPU load still will be 100%, it must be some bad I/O so it could be some bad cables to the harddrive or just a big mess in signaling on the motherboard (DMA lines messed up or so). Always check for bad capacitors too and if the south bridge gets to hot to touch they probably connected some MP3 player or phone to it that pulled way to much power.

Let us know what you found out .

[kahlil88]

Solved! There was some kind of serial bus conflict with the FireWire card. Removing that fixed everything.