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bios settings were lost with every shutdown, so it looked like the harddrive wasn't working: until i got a new battery, i had to re-enter the bios with every single reboot to reset bios settings. Some years later, I put a Linux distro on an old 90s era Dell desktop and had some problems when the battery died because the kernel was very unhappy about the system date and time: until I got a new battery, I had to enter the bios at boot-up to set the date and time approximately correctly
On a 2000 era Dell I have, the fan slowly died: it fortunately got very noisy and I replaced it. IIRC, Dell sometimes uses a proprietary fan connector
On my 90s era Dell, I once had enormous problems that I couldn't figure out: I finally pulled the old harddrive, slapped it into an enclosure, and ran a battery of disk checks -- which revealed that about 25% of the sectors had gone bad
If you google "machine_check_exception," you'll find webpages that suggest powersupply and overheating among other issues. If it were my machine, I'd check that the powersupply unit was installed correctly and had adequate power; I'd look at powersupply issues related to the bios; I'd doublecheck other bios settings and wonder about the battery; I'd make sure the fan was working correctly; and I'd try booting up a different OS off a thumb drive or cd or floppy to see if the problem was with the Windows installation
DISCLAIMER. I'm not an expert and I don't really know jack about this, except what I've accidentally learned mucking around with my own machines
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