system crashing???

[Trentham]

I am experiencing a problem, the cause of which is proving to be very tricky to locate. Perhaps someone out there will have experience of a similar thing or maybe some other ideas to put forward.

I have 'upgraded' three machines, two in an identical manner with the third being similar. In fact the upgrade represented a complete rebuild, retaining only the case, PSU and floppy drive. The new spec of the two is as follows...

Disk Hitachi 40Gb
Mainboard Asus A7N8X
Processor AMD Athlon XP 2500+
Graphics sparkle 32MB AGP
Memory 256Mb PC2700 DDR
OS Windows XP Pro

(the third machine is similar but with 512Mb RAM, a CR-RW and 750Mb ZIP drive and a lot of application software - but shows no problems)

Machine 'A' has been running without problem however machine 'B' has shown the trouble.

Before moving to the new system running XP, the machines were running an old DOS application for 3-4 weeks and no problems occurred however having now started using XP (which *could* just be a coincidence) very occasionally machine 'B' will either lose its signal to the monitor and refuse to start up again or will simply reboot itself. In the first case the main unit has power on although I've not been able (yet) to find out whether it is still running (via the network) and the only way to get things going again is to switch off the machine.

This problem is so occasional that the machine can run for a week or more without problem and then it can suddenly happen (when starting up from cold).

At the moment I'm trying to eliminate (or detect) faulty hardware by swapping over components and have ruled out the graphics card. I've run extensive memory tests on the RAM with no problems found and have currently swapped the memory and CPU and am waiting for a failure to appear somewhere.

Could it be a software problem?

I do recall that when I was putting the machines together I had problems installing the supplied drivers for the graphics card and it would only work on one of the machines, the other two machines would crash and so were built using the default XP drivers. Sadly the notes I made at the time detailing whihc machine was which in this case have gone missing.

One job I obviously need to pursue is to try and get some better graphics drivers and see if they help.

Any other ideas?

 

[search66]

Like you mentioned, this could be one of two things.

It's either a hardware problem or a driver problem.

Does that ASUS board have on-board video? If so, try to remove your video card and use the on-board video for a while to see if the card is the problem.

And XP is quite fussy with video drivers, play with different drivers.

 

[mahamat]

Hi Trentham, I had a very similar problem with the same mainboard that your using, Unfortunately the problem only stopped when I replaced the mainboard. I came to the conclusion by a process of elimination testing all sorts of components (video cards, Ram...etc) that I knew were working properly in the PC and the last thing I replaced was the mainboard which solved the mystery.

 

[bcastner]

Control Panel, Admistrative Tools, Event Viewer.

See if there is a detailed error message at the time the reboot occurs.

right-click My Computer, Properties, Advanced, Startup and Recovery - Settings, check the box to write an error report to the event log, and uncheck the box to automaticly restart on an error condition.

Post the error report back here.

 

[Trentham]

Thanks all for some useful pointers.

There's no onboard video but I'm currently getting the latest XP drivers to see if they help.

I keep forgetting to look in the event viewer to see if there is anything useful reported! I'll pursue that line of attack.