Crash & Burn

[Guest]

Hello to anyone out there who understands what may be me boggle with my new beast.. I've recently built my own box (been building them for 7 years now) with the following equipment and am having problems with it crashing way to often anyways, heres the list of items under the hood:
AMD Thunderbird 850Mhz processor
Skyhawk 300W power supply
Maxtor 13.5 GB HD (7200 RPM ATA 66)running on Primary Master ATA 100 IDE channel
Maxtor 6.7 GB HD (5400 RPM ATA 33)running on Secondary Master IDE channel
Kenwood 52x CDROM
256MB's of micron SDRAM
MSI StarForce 815 (GeForce 2) AGP video card (32MB's of DDRAM)Using the latest NVIDIA Detonator drivers Det ver 3 I believe
ABIT KT7A-RAID MB
Sound Blaster Live Value sound card (utilizing Liveware ver 3.0 software/drivers
MS Laser Optical mouse (MS Intellipoint 3.1 mouse drivers)
Win98SE OS (Utilizing DirectX 8)
No third party system utilities installed
Currently running NetBoost 2001 for an MTU optimizer
Saitek X36F Joystick combo (throttle and Joystick) using SGE version 2.3 for the driver/stick setup program.

Phew!!..mouthful..sorry but I didn't want to miss a system description trick ..

Long and the short..having constant problems with system lock up..no BSOD's (blue screens of death) no illegal op's..no GPF's ..just plain old lock up's and hard locks I might add...

P.S.. I'm currently at 90% GDI resources

any clue as to what may be the cause?

Dawntreader


Motivation is half the battle to success..personal intiative completes the process..<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Dawntreader on 04/05/01 08:03 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[BrainStorm]

Maybe your ATA-66 on ATA-100 but i'm not sure, we dont have the same mobo but I just posted my adventures with a A7V in the "Motherboard and chipsets", in the Chipset drivers topic.

I hope this can help.

It's better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick!

 

[Pettytheft]

Where are you lockups happening? What I mean is do you lock up while surfing the net or in the middle of a game?

<i>If you take a truth and follow it blindly, it will become a Falsehood and you a Fanatic.</i>

 

[Guest]

As a matter of fact, one of the HD's are an ATA-66 and the other is an old ATA-33. However, I've got one drive on the ATA-100 Primary Master channel with nothing slaved to it and the ATA-33 HDD on the Secondary Master channel nothing slaved in with it. My Kenwood 52x CDROM is on the standard ATA-33 Primary Master channel with nothing slaved in. The ATA-33 Secondary channel has nothing attached to it. I'll have to try the system without the ATA-33 drive and see if that helps matters any?

P.S. All components just listed are set to Master on their jumper settings due to there only being one item on the cable per the above listed channels.



Motivation is half the battle to success..personal intiative completes the process..

 

[Guest]

To answer your post, I'm connected to the net (56K USRobotics USB external modem..I know..uggh..yuch..narrowband) and playing games such as Mechwarrior 4 and Tribes. I've tryed just about all kinds of different ways of fixing it, such as re-installing DirectX version 8 (comes packaged with Mech 4), restoring a copy of my backed up registry, re-installing Win98SE with only those programs installed, updated the video drivers to the latest Detonator drivers from NVidia, updated with the latest liveware version for the soundblaster live card that I have (version 3.0 is what Creatives site shows), tryed both the old Saitek SGE joystick drivers as well as their latest ones, heck pick a trick..been there done that did that... Now with all that said, I've recently upgraded to Win2K Pro and that thing only locked up twice since I've upgraded with it last Friday..once again..pretty much the same setup..less lock up's..but still present none the less..My suspiscion is that it's the game Mech 4 but I need to do more testing on that idea..


Motivation is half the battle to success..personal intiative completes the process..<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Dawntreader on 04/10/01 09:07 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Pettytheft]

I've heard of some problems with system lockups and the microsoft intellimouse. Try plugging in another mouse and see if this helps.

If that does not work unplug all the componets that are not neccesary one by one. How often do you lock up in MW4? You may want to try another D3D game to see if you get similiar lockups. I've never played tribes so I dont know if it's D3D or OpenGL.

Also how many peripherals, components, and software packages have you installed since your last fresh installation of Windows.

If you upgraded from Win98 to Win2k without doing a clean install that always gives headaches. They tend to get worse as well.

<i>If you take a truth and follow it blindly, it will become a Falsehood and you a Fanatic.</i>

 

[Guest]

Problem solved...😡 Unfortunately to my bad luck..sigh
Found out that the Abit KT7A-RAID board that I have, has the PCI slots in it built a bit to wide for any of my peripheral card. The slot that is there for the card(s) to fit into are a tad to wide. The long and the short, the cards kind of flop in the breeze when put in the slot. Usually there's a bit of snuggness in the slot when you put the card(s) in but this one seems to have a defect that way causing a "short circuit" or intermittent contact with the card(s) that are put into them. Oh well, the turn in time for the mother board has exceeded it's time limit so, I'm stuck with buying a new board I guess..thank you for you posts and assistance..

DT

Motivation is half the battle to success..personal intiative completes the process..