My stupid computer
-
CG admitted: I am in fact using a Soundblaster Live. Take it out. See if that helps. It may be unrelated, but your story reminded me of a motherboard i used to own, which would be unbearably flakey whenever i installed an SBLive! in it. The problem showed up first when running filters on large images in Photoshop, and so i thought it was memory... several days of hair pulling and memory purchases convinced me otherwise. :)
--- the work, which will become a new genre unto itself, will be called...hmph. Sounds like my fancy sound card is headed for ebay. I'll try that tonight, and see what happens, thanks. Christian I have drunk the cool-aid and found it wan and bitter. - Chris Maunder
-
After everyone's help here, I took out half of my 512 MB RAM and my PC seemed much better. So I went and bought a new stick of 512 and put it in - instant reboot hell. I took it out and put the 256 back in and it's better, but still rebooted once or twice, while reading a DVD to copy it. Surely a brand new 512 MB stick would not be broken ? Is my motherboard stuffed ? Christian I have drunk the cool-aid and found it wan and bitter. - Chris Maunder
-
After everyone's help here, I took out half of my 512 MB RAM and my PC seemed much better. So I went and bought a new stick of 512 and put it in - instant reboot hell. I took it out and put the 256 back in and it's better, but still rebooted once or twice, while reading a DVD to copy it. Surely a brand new 512 MB stick would not be broken ? Is my motherboard stuffed ? Christian I have drunk the cool-aid and found it wan and bitter. - Chris Maunder
Christian Graus wrote: Surely a brand new 512 MB stick would not be broken ? That is totally possible. We had to send back 2 512MB Crucial dimms on our first DDR mobo because they simply did not work. And these were the ones that were listed on the compatibility page... Did you try inserting just the 512MB module in the closest slot to the chipset? Is this a dual channel motherboard? John
-
Run this at least over night. I had a system that required a 70 hour run of memtest86 to find an error. I was trying to use 2.5GB of memory and it was completly stable on one mobo but another of the same exact type and model it did not work... John
-
Christian Graus wrote: Surely a brand new 512 MB stick would not be broken ? That is totally possible. We had to send back 2 512MB Crucial dimms on our first DDR mobo because they simply did not work. And these were the ones that were listed on the compatibility page... Did you try inserting just the 512MB module in the closest slot to the chipset? Is this a dual channel motherboard? John
John M. Drescher wrote: Did you try inserting just the 512MB module in the closest slot to the chipset? Yeah, that was how I set it up. John M. Drescher wrote: Is this a dual channel motherboard? What does that mean ? Christian I have drunk the cool-aid and found it wan and bitter. - Chris Maunder
-
John M. Drescher wrote: Did you try inserting just the 512MB module in the closest slot to the chipset? Yeah, that was how I set it up. John M. Drescher wrote: Is this a dual channel motherboard? What does that mean ? Christian I have drunk the cool-aid and found it wan and bitter. - Chris Maunder
This means that the mobo uses 2 independent memory controllers and usually you use memory in pairs although it is not absolutely necissary. Most recent P4 mobos do this and also nVidia Athlon mobos. John
-
After everyone's help here, I took out half of my 512 MB RAM and my PC seemed much better. So I went and bought a new stick of 512 and put it in - instant reboot hell. I took it out and put the 256 back in and it's better, but still rebooted once or twice, while reading a DVD to copy it. Surely a brand new 512 MB stick would not be broken ? Is my motherboard stuffed ? Christian I have drunk the cool-aid and found it wan and bitter. - Chris Maunder
-
*sheepish voice* um... yeah ? I am in fact using a Soundblaster Live. Can I add in my defence that 'Shot in the dark' is an excellent Ozzy song ? Or will that cost me your help ? :P Christian I have drunk the cool-aid and found it wan and bitter. - Chris Maunder
-
After everyone's help here, I took out half of my 512 MB RAM and my PC seemed much better. So I went and bought a new stick of 512 and put it in - instant reboot hell. I took it out and put the 256 back in and it's better, but still rebooted once or twice, while reading a DVD to copy it. Surely a brand new 512 MB stick would not be broken ? Is my motherboard stuffed ? Christian I have drunk the cool-aid and found it wan and bitter. - Chris Maunder
Do you use SDRAM? AFAIK, there were two generations of SDRAM, with different components. My 3-years old motherboards works with the first generation only :sigh:
And I'm talking to myself at night because I can't forget Back and forth through my mind Behind a cigarette
-
After everyone's help here, I took out half of my 512 MB RAM and my PC seemed much better. So I went and bought a new stick of 512 and put it in - instant reboot hell. I took it out and put the 256 back in and it's better, but still rebooted once or twice, while reading a DVD to copy it. Surely a brand new 512 MB stick would not be broken ? Is my motherboard stuffed ? Christian I have drunk the cool-aid and found it wan and bitter. - Chris Maunder
Christian Graus wrote: Surely a brand new 512 MB stick would not be broken ? Another vote for hell, yeah. I recently helped my sister build a new machine - a P4 at 800MHz FSB with DDR PC3200 RAM. The 512MB stick she bought from a colleague worked fine. Adding the new 512MB stick of eBuyer no-brand RAM (I think it was Elpida when it turned up) caused the system to go horribly unstable, corrupting stuff left right and centre. Removing the new stick sorted it out. Here's the rub. While a stick of bad RAM is in your computer, your operating system is potentially using it as write-back disk cache. Anything that got written to disk while there was bad RAM could have got corrupted in memory, and is therefore may not be an accurate record of what was written to RAM. This can lead to registry and binary corruption. If you defragged your disk - and remember that Windows XP does some disk optimisation while the system is idle - start from scratch. You simply don't know what was corrupted. I usually set 'Quick POST' to Disabled in the BIOS setup screens when adding new RAM to a machine, at least for a few boots. This isn't anything like an extensive test, but it does give a basic function check that the memory works.