PC Freezing - Need a little help from my friends ! 1

[gstonian]

Ok, at the end of my tether now. For the last 2-3 weeks I have been suffering from random freezes while running different apps on Windows. I have tried a multitude of things which I'll detail below but would appreciate any advice.

Started happenning after Telewest starting screwing me over with dodgy connections and their sales staff started me doubting my own setup. After one phone call I ended up uninstalling Kaspersky Anti Virus to try another product which ended up deleting a whole load of IDR (I think) Index files & took over 2 hours to uninstall.

Also just before this time I did a little tinkering with my ATI 9800PRO and did a little overclocking (though testing it at every stage using cs:s & 3dmark03). At the time this didn't cause any problems but read on.

After the freezes started I tried a number of things (in pretty much this order). I'll only list the major things as it could go on forever.

Virus scanned & Adaware / Spyware scanned pc.
Re-installed XP
Formatted Hard Drive
Re-installed Kaspersky - At this point my PC wouldn't even boot up
Nuked the C: drive with Duke Nuke
Re-installed XP
Re-installed XP onto seperate Harddrive

As it was still freezing/hanging I took a look inside and discovered one of the power pins on my 9800 was blacker than the rest and seems to have burnt out somewhere. So I borrowed a friends old graphics card and just ran a basic pc with no games for a while. This again did not resolve the problem and still hung.

I then went out and bought a new 550W PSU & hey presto it seemed to run a lot better. I ran it over the weekend for hours and it seemed to only hang once. So I put in my old 9800PRO and again it ran better and although still hung occasionally it was more like once a day rather than once an hour.

By this point however I had already ordered a ATI X800XT graphics card. I bought this as it was in my price range and still meant to be better than my 9800. So that arrived last night and plugged that in (inc latest drivers). NOt sure but it looks like the hanging is back.... but my main issue as of last night is I couldn't even complete a 3dmark benchmark without it hanging !?!?!?

Question I have now is, I have a secondary motherboard (bought at same time as PSU) should I just go and replace my motherboard (in case something similar has happenned @ the same time as 9800) ?

 

[Grenage]

I would try the motherboard, since you already have it. Failing that, I'd be looking at swapping out the memory. Narrow the possible culprit down as much as possible.


Carlsberg don't run I.T departments, but if they did they'd probably be more fun.

 

[TrojanSquirrel]

I agree with the memory option, but another simple possable fix would be to swap the bios battery between the two motherboards and see if this helps.

A bad battery can make your pc do a lot of strange things!

I'm pretty sure that the 550w psu is ample, but if you are running a shed load of IDE drives and the graphics card off the same 12v rail this could be causing problems. I always run my two optical drives and graphics card from the same 12v rail and the hdds from the other.

Another option is you have a flaky supply from the wall socket, although if the machine has been running fine before then I would think it unlikely.

Regards,

Rob

http://www.transcom.net