How PC's will be the death of us all...

[DeZmond]

... or, more specifically, me.

I just got a new motherboard, spent an hour fitting it all together, two hours playing with it getting windows installed, but now the thing's just unreliable! Sometimes it won't boot, or sometimes it crashes while in the BIOS, while other times it boots to Windows without complaint. There is some strange stuff going on though- like running DXdiag, when you see the spinning cube, instead of that ending after about 10 seconds it carries on indefinitely unless stopped. Also .kkreiger doesn't load, just crashes 10% of the way into loading.

And don't even get me started on the sound drivers... disabled the onboard to use my brand new Audigy 4, but it's even more unreliable with it plugged in. So I remove it, reenable the onboard, go to reinstall the drivers but the driver setup doesn't recognise the hardware!

Argh!

 

[thatbloke]

Dodgy PSU or power connector?

getting any beep codes?

tried testing the RAM with something like memtest86?

bluescreens?

is it restarting or shutting down?

could it possibly be some kind of overheating problem?

 

[waterproofbob]

TB has just got pretty much every nail on the head in one. thats quite an impressive list, should be stuck onto everyones desktops as the things to check when a fault occurs.

Anyway moving on, i know this is a school boy error but have u over tightened the screws on the mobo as this will cause it to intermittently crash. Also check u have the cpu seated well. if you have the rest of the system running stably before the new mobo it may be that the board be all kinds of borked in which case its RMA all the way.

 

[[THN]Buffalo_Hunter]

I take it you reformatted the hard drive before reinstalling Windows?

Other than that, the only other thing I can think of is an out-of-date BIOS, but if the system's that unstable you may not have enough time to flash it before it falls over again.

On the RAM issue, what type have you got? If you have two sticks you could try running with one at a time.

Check the heatsink on the CPU is fitted correctly and the fan is connected to the right plug on the motherboard.

 

[DeZmond]

Thanks for all advice, to address some questions:
-ram is a new 1gb ddr 400 stick, could possibly be the issue but i have no extra modules to test with.
-overtightening is unlikely, but i'll try loosening it. Also, the processor + heatsink are correctly seated.

Oh, sorry for lack of grammar - i'm on my phone atm...

 

[DeZmond]

Well, loosened the motherboard slightly and it seemed to help a wee bit, but I'm still getting errors - it cannot find the onboard sound for the life of it and also occassionally likes to display a "Page fault in non-paged area" BSOD. In other words, it looks like it's the RAM, especially since the last time it did it it was just about to initialise a 3D scene in Enemy Territory...
*sigh* a new stick of RAM for me, it seems...

We'll see how it goes - I'll keep you all updated. Also thanks for all hints, tips and thoughts. Much appreciated

 

[thatbloke]

get that RAM RMA'd!

Got a friend's stick o RAM you could borrow for an hour or so just to test the stability of your system with it in?

 

[Tetsuo_Shima]

Dez, as far as the soundcard goes I'm not sure what to do. However, the intermittent crashing sounds similar to what I got when I first booted up my new PC. It'd maybe work for about 15 minutes or so, maybe even manage to get in a quick game of CoD2, but then itd reset itself. After that restart, it'd reset again just after loading up windows, then reset again even before it loaded windows, then again whilst BIOS was on. Basically, it'd keep resetting and more frequently each time. Now, they way I sorted it was taking out one of my two 1gb ram sticks. It ran stable with 1 gig of ram in the first mem bank. After running stable with 1gb ram in, I hazarded the 2nd in again - but the resetting came back. After that, I tried running with the first (stable) stick in bank one, and instead of putting stick two in bank two I put it in bank three. After that, all my problems stopped.

So, in short, try putting the RAM stick in different memory banks and see what that gives you.

 

[DeZmond]

Update: It lives! Well, for 99.5% of the time, anyway. Turns out switching the RAM from DIMM slot 1 to 4 has helped, although it can still crash but only very rarely - looks like I really will need new RAM, but it's easily stable enough at the moment for most uses. And the soundcard works also, and can I just say it is so easily worth the extra money over onboard it's frightening. On my 5.1 setup it sounds glorious!

Oh, and while I remember: I can now heartily recommend the Trust 520W Low Noise PSU - got it for ~£25 and it's great - plenty of stable power and it's very quiet. Also it has a brushed black aluminium casing which looks amazing.

Much thanks to everyone's ideas! Now I'm off to find a cheap PCI-E graphics card...

 

[HotStuff]

"cheap" is a word that has started to bother me about 2.5 years ago with computer hardware. I always used to buy the cheapest I could.

Last upgrade I did in July 04, I decided to buy quality components which of course cost a lot more. Since then my system crashes on average about once every 4 or 5 months - if even that!

I know much of that stability will have come about due to better OS and improved coding. However in listening to probs on this thread it does lead me to believe that "you get what you pay for" is still very much a phrase that still has credence today.