Need your opinion..new mobo or not?

[algae1]

Recently I have had a lot of problems with one of my three systems. The system in questioin is used for work related functions so high performance is not a priority. The specs are as follows:
AMD 1600+, MSI K7T266 Pro 2 mobo, 512 mb DDR Ram, Ati Radeon 9600 Pro Video, Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound.
The problem started with intermittent and unpredictable stop errors, blue screens, sum check errors....it has been a nightmare and a time eater. So far I have bought new Ram, a new power supply and a new hard drive hoping that each would fix the problem.
The power supply was the last thing I tried but as I was trying to install windows on my brand new hdd I once again ran into error messages etc.
Bear in mind that I have run Memtest for hours and hours on both the old RAM and the new but each time it showed no errors at all.
Tonight I finally tried to install Win XP Pro with only one stick of RAM (256 mb) in the first slot and presto...it installed fine and so far it has run perfectly for about 8 hours with no problems at all.
This tells me that it must be a bad slot on the mobo.
Finally my question....what would you do? Would you just fill up the good slot with 512 mb of RAM (I need that much as run Photoshop a lot ) or bite the bullet and rip out the old mobo and stick in a new one?
Frankly I'm sick of messing with the darned thing. What do you think?
Thanks
Gary

 

[micker377]

Did you try the other stick of memory in same slot? Did you try the "good" memory in slot 2 by itself? It may not be bad. Some sticks just don't play nice with other sticks. Is the memory similar in the other computers, so you can swap around? It seems you would be money ahead by fixing this problem. If you get a new board, you'll probably have to buy new memory anyway.

Of course, we ALWAYS need a new computer! <grin>

 

[algae1]

No I didn't try those things but I will. However I think I can find some boards that take the PC2700 DDR memory...I hope)


Thanks

Gary

 

[Sleepsalot]

http://www.tigerdirect.com

has lots of boards for that cpu and mem.

Wayne

Life is a big Roleplaying adventure.

Wayne

 

[garebo]

Sorry, dont mean to be rude but i dont advise tigerdirect as their prices are too high, shipping prices are double what they should be, and they substitute used for new, just a terrible place to shop, in my opinion, and i'm not alone in that opinion, i can tell you that.
Try newegg.com, much better. Also, try pricewatch.


Good advice + great people = tek-tips

 

[TomSwingruber]

Just a thought
Pull out all boards not required to run basics.
I keep a couple of very basic video boards around
just for testing flaky systems.

I just tried to put a new Radeon PCI bus video card
in a brand new Dell to run a second monitor
and all kinds of strange things started happening.
Like I couldn't see my network card. The windows explorer
would lock up etc.
I stuck in an old video board from the junk pile and the
system was very happy.

Luck Tom

 

[algae1]

Yes I need to stockpile a few components and no get rid of them as soon as I replace them.

Thanks
Gary

 

[Freestone]

Inspect your board for bad capacitors as it is of the right age to fall into this possibility.

One of many sites:

http://badcaps.net/