A little history. I was gone for 5 months, computer was working fine before I left. Came back and first thing I noticed was that it was slow. There were a couple of people using it while I was gone. So I went through and cleaned it out and got it somewhat back to speed. I did notice that even still it was not running normally. I bought a zalman cooler for my q6600 and a 5850 to upgrade my 8800gt. Installed both, overclocked the 6600 to 3.0ghz. Ran it like this for about 2 weeks. Temps were fine, nothing out of the ordinary. I'm pretty sure my overclocking did not mess anything up because it was acting strange before. Anyways here is what I am dealing with.
-Sometimes it runs completely fine. I can play games, alt tab out and do other things, everything will be nice. Then I go to restart, it hangs on the motherboard screen. I try to press Del to get to the BIOS and it does nothing most times. Some times it will go to bios but will be unresponsive, when it finally does do something it uncontrollably scrolls through the options and I cannot stop it, have to reset. Sometimes it hangs on the motherboard screen and will not do anything so I have to reset. Strange thing is sometimes it will load up perfectly fine and only stay on the gigabyte screen for a couple seconds.
-I go to load a game sometimes and it will not load. Just goes back to windows.
-Did some check disks and they go fine until the latter portion and it will take 2 hours to complete.
-Did a memtest as I thought it might be the memory. Got an error so I pulled all but one dimm out. Ran test again, was good. Put one more in, ran test again, was good. So I played around with games, alt tabbing out to see how it was running, all seemed to be better despite the fact I was running on 2gb rather than 4gb. Was very pleased as I thought all I had to do was buy new memory to solve the problem. Well, restarted, it hung on the gigabyte screen for 2-3min before finally loading. Then got into windows, tried to open up a game and it took forever and finally canceled and went back to windows.
I am about out of things I know to try. I just spend 300 on the 5850 and 40 on the zalman so I really do not want to just go out and spend 100 on ram and 200 on a motherboard just to see if it works. If I do that I might as well have went out and built a new computer. Anyone have any ideas on how I can pinpoint the problem? Oh, when I overclocked the q6600 the temps never got about 65 degrees, so I am pretty sure I did not fry anything. And for the past two weeks I have set it back to 2.4ghz just because I dont feel the need to overclock when I have a serious problem with something else.
-Sometimes it runs completely fine. I can play games, alt tab out and do other things, everything will be nice. Then I go to restart, it hangs on the motherboard screen. I try to press Del to get to the BIOS and it does nothing most times. Some times it will go to bios but will be unresponsive, when it finally does do something it uncontrollably scrolls through the options and I cannot stop it, have to reset. Sometimes it hangs on the motherboard screen and will not do anything so I have to reset. Strange thing is sometimes it will load up perfectly fine and only stay on the gigabyte screen for a couple seconds.
-I go to load a game sometimes and it will not load. Just goes back to windows.
-Did some check disks and they go fine until the latter portion and it will take 2 hours to complete.
-Did a memtest as I thought it might be the memory. Got an error so I pulled all but one dimm out. Ran test again, was good. Put one more in, ran test again, was good. So I played around with games, alt tabbing out to see how it was running, all seemed to be better despite the fact I was running on 2gb rather than 4gb. Was very pleased as I thought all I had to do was buy new memory to solve the problem. Well, restarted, it hung on the gigabyte screen for 2-3min before finally loading. Then got into windows, tried to open up a game and it took forever and finally canceled and went back to windows.
I am about out of things I know to try. I just spend 300 on the 5850 and 40 on the zalman so I really do not want to just go out and spend 100 on ram and 200 on a motherboard just to see if it works. If I do that I might as well have went out and built a new computer. Anyone have any ideas on how I can pinpoint the problem? Oh, when I overclocked the q6600 the temps never got about 65 degrees, so I am pretty sure I did not fry anything. And for the past two weeks I have set it back to 2.4ghz just because I dont feel the need to overclock when I have a serious problem with something else.