new problem: freezing on startup

[darrendavid]

Hi all-

I'm running an IWill XP333-R/Athlon XP 1800+/512MB PC2700 DDR at 2.6v/Radeon 8500/Win 2K SP3 system. It took me about a month to get the RAM voltage dialed in, but the system has been rock solid for almost a year.

Recently, I started having system freezes where the screen would get filled with a repeating pattern of some sort of blocky graphic noise, and all I could manage was a hard restart. Well, now that same freeze is happening every time the system immediately proceeds past the "Starting Up" screen with the Windows logo.

Here's the catch - when I set my CPU to run at [100] in the BIOS, no problems. As soon as I kick it up to [133], where it's been all year, the problem shows up.

Any ideas?

Thanks for any and all insight.

Cheers,
Darren

 

[papasmurf]

does your agp bus run off your fsb? if so try setting the jumper on your mobo to 133mhz fsb dont set it in your bios set it on the mobo there is almost always a jumper there in case you have a 100mhz fsb proc or 133mhz fsb proc. if that doesnt work then is your video card overclocked? if yes try underclocking it. if no then try underclocking your cpu in small steps to find the highest stable speed. you might also look into a new motherboard bios for a bit of extra stability.

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smurf B- oh man as soon as we got out of the bar she started smurfing me
smurf A- shut the smurf up
smurf A- right in the smurfing pariking lot?

 

[Guest]

It would be nice to try a different graphics card and see if it went away

 

[untweaked]

it may be heat,you might try cleaning the cpu, i am serious
if you havent had any problems for a hole year and suddenly it is locking,(and you havent changed anything else) buy a can of air and clean the fan/heatsink.

 

[darrendavid]

i can get the system to run in safe mode at 133, and the FSB is jumpered to 133 on the board.

could be heat... do you think i should reseat the fan on the chip as well? The system does run rock solid with the CPU clock running at 100, and when i do kick it up to 133 it locks at the very same point during boot up, whether or not the system is cold -- so i'm not *totally* convinced that it's heat.