I've got Scratch installed on 5 computers in my lab at my Learning Center (and on 30+ computers at the lab in my school) in Thailand. So far, no major problems to report from any of them, except for one machine.
Yesterday, I was teaching a lesson in Scratch at my center and I was using one of the computers to demonstrate while the kids worked on the other four.
Suddenly, as I tried to open a file in Scratch, the whole computer locked up (I'm running Microsoft Windows XP Pro, 5.1.2600 SP 2, with Phoenix BIOS 1012, on a Pentium 4 with 3Ghz and 1 GB of RAM).
I tried to Ctrl-Alt-Del out of it, but that didn't work so I pressed the restart button and when it rebooted, I got the Phoenix BIOS beep code for a bad mother board!!
I assumed it was a hardware fault, but today when I booted up the machine, it worked just fine until I ran Scratch. Again, as I was trying to open a file, the computer locked up at the point where Scratch was showing the file browsing menu.
Again, I rebooted, but this time I did not get the BIOS beep codes.
The computer seems to be working just fine right now. I'm going to try starting Scratch again and see if I can duplicate the error a third time. But right now, I'm posting this to the forums from that computer, so everything seems normal on it right now. No excessive memory usage and no resource intensive processes that might lock up the machine.
I'll post this and then try to lock this machine up again. If it happens a third time, I'll post from one of the other machines in the lab to let you know what happened.
Any ideas what might be going on?
Thanks,
Geo
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OK, I tried duplicating the lock-up, but Scratch seemed to work fine this time. The computer did lock up once on reboot, however, without anything else running.
Right now, it seems to be working fine. I can open Scratch without a problem and it responds well, even with Explorer and some videos playing in the background.
So what give? Bad motherboard on that machine? Seems intermitent.
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Sounds like it might be the hardware problem that affected a lot of machines built in 2005? (not sure of the year). There was a bunch of out-of-spec capacitors shipped from China to a bunch of manufactures that started failing after about a year. Look at the motherboard---if there are any bulging electrolytic capacitors, you'll need to have them replaced (or the whole motherboard, if still in warranty).
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