Was working on a eMachines ET1831-07
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883114084 with a Pentium E5400 CPU in it tonight to figure out why it randomly locks up after powered for days on end as a office computer. What I found I had to laugh about.
Not just is the motherboard in this system a low quality ECS brand board which are known for being bottom of the barrel quality and problematic, but also when looking further to try to figure out why the face of the computer always has a constant green glow, but no HDD activity flicker, I saw that this build was so cutting corners in quality and features that they never designed it with a HDD indicator LED.
The front panel has just 2 wire pairs going to it for (soft) Power Switch push button, and the other pair is for the System LED which is always on. Looking further at the motherboard it has pins and HDD LED feature, but I guess adding a 10 cent HDD LED to the design would cut too far into their margin.
Tempted to drill a hole in the plastic and mount a HDD LED so that I can look over and see what activity is going on if any when it locks up etc. But its not my computer.
Memtest86 comes up clean. Added battery backup to it and it still does it. Swapped power supply and still does it. Rebuilt system fresh to clean state with recovery set that was burned to DVD's and it still does it.
Determined that its just because its a crappy ECS board with low quality parts and so the solution may be to either just hold the power button in when it locks up to hard reboot it and just have them live with that or swap the motherboard.
But I still feel this urge that the engineers at emachines seriously messed up by not adding a HDD LED to the design to look to see whats going on. I have used that HDD LED for like 30 years as an indicator to see whats going on when things slow or lag etc. If you have a good paced system that all of a sudden has slowness or lag without HDD activity then you know you have some serious problems and its not just swap file traffic or load time of a large application etc.
I guess with this model your stuck with using either a CPU & Memory gadget or bring up task manager and look at CPU and memory usage etc.
