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Hi, I have this HP Media Center 873n that I have been trying to repair and it is not working. I have tried everything I can think of and I can't figure it out so I thought I would try here. Just so you know, I am very experienced and have tried known good parts.

I got this computer and it was locking up during bootup. It passes post but freezes during windows boot/splash screen. I tried using the destructive restore and it seemed to go fine until I got to the part where you enter language, time zone, and stuff and when it got there, it went into super slow turtle mode so I ended up quitting on it because it locked up and took forever( over an hour) to get off one page! So then I thought I would try restoring it with a factory xp pro copy instead of the HP media center restore. I only formated the main partition and left the recovery partition in tact but I heard I killed that because formatting the regular partition you loose the msinst folder or something like that but no biggie because I have a retail version of xp pro to use if I can get it to work. I changed boot order to boot from cd and windows goes through like normal and loads files needed, but when it reboots it comes up and should go to the install screen where normally states 40 mins remaining, but it is just blank teal/greenish screen with the curser. I can move the mouse and it doesn't seem to be locked up but never goes past that. I have tried new hard drives, new ram, new video card and nothing helps. I also tried to strip it down to just dvd drive, hd, ram, video card and install that way basically just removing the tv card, media card reader, floppy, cdrom, and soundblaster audio card. When I remove them, it won't boot or come on at all! I figure HP must have something stored in ROM that will not allow it to boot if stuff is removed since it won't power on with items removed or unhooked. I have never had a problem repairing or restoring a pc like this before EVER! Normally if I do, I swap some HW with know good HW and find bad part and replace it. My problem is, I can't find any HW bad on this PC! Motherboard passes post and boots fine, I ran Windows Memory Diagnostic to check and see if maybe MOBO was having problems writing to RAM but all tests are passing with not a single error and it has been running for at least couple hours now or more.

I have racked my brain on this thing for days now and can't figure it out. Only thing I can think of is that the bios has some stupid setting in it blocking me from installing xp pro since it stopped it from booting when I removed items that should not matter if they are connected or not! Has anyone had this problem or know how I can fix it? Anyone know where I can get a bios update for it or a copy of the bios so I could possibly re-flash it. It has pheonix-award ver 6.0 rev 3.13 currently. It says i845q-lpc47m1-6a69vf0kc-00 at the bottom of the bios diag screen during startup if it might help.

Thank you for your time and help with this problem and I'm sorry the question is so long but I wanted to give as much detail as possible and try to avoid everyone answering with stuff I have already tried! I will check in often and will to try about anything! I will choose best answer and give credit if someone comes up with a solution that works! =)

Hi, I have a Dell 4550 that I was working on for a friend and I can not figure this problem out for the life of me. For some reason, the onboard NIC says cable is disconnected when you plug the cable into it and when you unplug the cable it switches to connected. It's like completely backwards. I completely restored the OS with a fresh install of XP w/sp3, went to dell and got all the drivers and installed them! Everything works but that damn onboard NIC!!! I'm very experienced IT person and I know I installed the proper drivers. XP installed the NIC by itself but it was messed up so that is why I went to dell and got the drivers there and tried them. I have tried uninstalling the NIC and re-installing it using both XP generic drivers and drivers from dell. Has anyone else in the field experienced this problem and figured out how to fix it? Right now I'm just using an extra NIC I had but I would like to get the onboard working. Thanks for you help!!!