 i m not familiar with dell dimension xps and to be honest not familiar with any brand name computers most of my experience is china motherboards but i ve seen same behavior once changing the battery helps that time it was big round battery with panasonic on it computer starts beeping then we removed battery from mb it even booted up well loosing time and some other things just my NUMBER cents misha on wed NUMBER aug NUMBER aherne peter pahernNUMBER wrote ok iknow this is blatantly ot but i m beginning to go insane had an old dell dimension xps sitting in the corner and decided to put it to use snip irish linux users group ilug URL URL for un subscription information list maintainer listmaster URL 