System issues .. major system issues !!

Megatron

ok the system seems to go nuts .
I get -13% free sometimes ,
it's an amd chip witha gigahetz board,
TNT2
Soundblaster Live
Modem 0 56k
192 MB ram
games do load but you are lucky if you get to the first screen of them
loggin on to the internet is fine .. but it will disconect you in 15 mins !!!!! i've formatted and reinstalled, done every possable thing and it still kepps happening ...

any ideas any one ? cusi'm all out

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No !!!!! I will crush you with my Bare hands

Canaboid

Operating system ?
Chipset ?

WhiteWashMan

what exactly is the problem?

strat

Not too sure if this helps but for clearing out and freeing up ram i cant fault Tweak All which
certainly helps performance.

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"m33p m33p"

Megatron

It's win 98
and it's not a memory problem it's somesort of hardware problem .
Me thinks it's the soundcard
i've tried it on 2 other systems
on one of them it worked fine, the other the same problem occoured.

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No !!!!! I will crush you with my Bare hands

WhiteWashMan

ok james, i shall ask this only once....
what is the problem?

Megatron

the systemp crashes, when ever it want's
going on the internet is next to imposable
booting is well hard sometimes

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No !!!!! I will crush you with my Bare hands

WhiteWashMan

so the system crashes periodically with what sort of an error?
blue screen? just hangs, do you have to reboot or end task?
have you run msconfig and turned of everything useless at boot up?
have you removed your hardware bits one at a time to try and isolate the problem?
try installing win2k. its a lot better than win98.
first thou. try running with just 64 stick of ram. could be a ram problem if its completely random....

Megatron

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by WhiteWashMan:

so the system crashes periodically with what sort of an error?
blue screen? just hangs, do you have to reboot or end task?
have you run msconfig and turned of everything useless at boot up?
have you removed your hardware bits one at a time to try and isolate the problem?
try installing win2k. its a lot better than win98.
first thou. try running with just 64 stick of ram. could be a ram problem if its completely random....</font>

done all that and the system will just hang ... and sit there while i rant and tell it ow i'm going to hit it with my new and improved Hammer V2.01

this problem is driving me nutz

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No !!!!! I will crush you with my Bare hands

Gerry

Tell us the exact specs, and exactly what goes wrong.

WhiteWashMan

when does it start to hang?
did you install anything and then it hung?
install win2k

Canaboid

Christ it's hard to help some people.
What fuggin' chipset is on the mobo ?

_CreeD_

He mentioned on another post that he's in Sales now....do you really expect a straight answer?...

If it's survived a reinstall,and it seems the happen when you hit a game's title screen, then perhaps your SBlive is conflicting with something else (Your modem perhaps, or vidcard).
It hates to share IRQ's,have alook and make sure it has it's own. If not then move it to a dif. PCI slot and try again.
Actually, there's some dim memory of a conflict between TNT2's and SBlives drifting around my old bonce. If all else fails have a look on Creative Labs support site, I think there's more info. there.

Megatron

Creed i've tried all of that and still nothing i've even rang C/labs and still nothing , yes i knew about the conflick between tnt2 + SBlive but this isn'tthe problem ...
BTW this is a mates puter i'm just seeing if i can find him some help cus lets face it he needs it as he is Tech Supp at Dell !!!

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No !!!!! I will crush you with my Bare hands

Gerry

Theres no simple solution. Take all the cards out of the machine, except obviously the graphics card. Reinstall windows, install the latest via 4-in-1 drivers if its a via board, which you havent even made indicated. See if it works then, then add cards back 1 by 1. How do you expect people to help you if you dont give the exact details of the machine? "Its an amd chip with a gigahertz board" makes no real sense. I can obviously work out that its a 1 gigathertz amd athlon, what type we don't know, what motherboard we don't know. Post up the exact system specs, and stop moaning that its not this, and its not that. You havent a clue what it is or isn't.

Megatron

the make of the board is Gigahertz ...
the amd is K6
i'll get in touch witht he guy and get him to post here....

and i have tried what you have said apart from the 4 - 1 driver thingy ....
and it mad no differance ....


BTW Gerry ..... i don't like your tone of type .... i've done a lot of work on the system , a system that is not mine i do appricate you trying to help, but don't go postal on me .... cus i'll go .. i'll do ... i'll sit here and take it .. cus you don't know what i look like !!!

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No !!!!! I will crush you with my Bare hands

[This message has been edited by Megatron (edited 16-03-2001).]

WhiteWashMan

james, upgrade every last driver.
new detonator drivers, new sb live drivers etc

Gerry

Yeah, that explains a lot. So its an amd k6, on a gigabyte board. K6 systems are noted for their instability. About all you can do is try mucking around with bios settings, try it with different sticks of ram, etc. If you want, I will take a look at the system, for less than if you brought it into a pc shop.

Megatron

Eamo, my m8 did that .. nothing changed
Gerry thanks for the offer but my m8 is either going to fix it by the end of the weekend or it goes into orbit and the Internationl space station can have it ....

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No !!!!! I will crush you with my Bare hands

Blitzkrieger

I actually had a lot of the same problems when my hard drive crashed - but there was godawful noise coming off the drive so you'd probably hear that

ARACK2000

system spec
CPU amd k2 450 3D
board is gigabyte
chipset is an Aladdin 5
ram 192mb 100mhz
operating system is 98
floppy drive
2 hard drives 10gb and 12gb
fat 32 no partitions
cd rom and cdr
cdr is an acer atpi cdr
Creative TNT 2 ultra
Creative Sound Blaster live value
lucent 56K v90 modem
extras 3com network card no longer in system
external 100 zip
Lexmark z51 printer
speakers
mike
Logitech mouse and keyboard

system is about 2 years old problems starter 6 months ago and are getting worse.

Problems are

1) while on the net system resources can reach -17% 1 window open sys very slow
close program will have
explorer, iexplorer, systray and ranapp running

2) music cd in sys cdplayer pops up sys hangs

3) if I open multimedia in control panel sys hangs

4) some games will not run

shogun total war. intro movie plays then pops back to windows
starfleet command empires at war. very slow hangs system
star treck new worlds. very slow hangs system
star terck armada. very slow hangs system

shogun and armada worked fine
starfleet command and new worlds never worked fine on another sys

5) mouse pointer flashes it changes shape when scrolling it can be a pointer a hand or a vertical line.
ps 2 or com ports same.

What I have done

formatted, fdisked and debugged both hdd
reinstalled win 98, 98se, win2k server and pro

win2k server and pro hang on log in screen after install.

tried all chipset drivers from 1.65e to 1.73e flashed bios flashed tnt2 .
installed latest drivers on modem, sound card, video card, ide controllers, firmware upgrade on cdr and changed ide cables

installed os with only video card, cdrom, 1 hdd and ram in system
added cards 1 at a time same problems

tried 1 33mb 66mhz
1 64mb 100mhz
2 64mb 100mhz
1 128mb 100mhz
2 128mb 100mhz
1 256mb 133mhz

installed os on another system brought hdd home same problems
I believe mother board is dying will try to install os with all my bits on another motherboard

any advise or
any ides wise ones

WhiteWashMan

get a new system board.
it sounds like the only thing you havent changed or tried..

astrofool

this being of the super7 motherboard range, the chipsets were fairly sh ite, go to the Ali site and look for drivers, the AGP portion on them was especially bad, try a PCI card, getting a new mobo now will be quite hard as they're not really made anymore, and everyone is trying to forget the Super7 range since the athlon came out.

A new chip + board may be the answer, athlon/Duron with mobo right now is about £200, and would probably solve it, of course the case will have to be ATX to do this, but performance would be many times greater. That much drives + peripherals on an ALI super7 board is a recipe for disaster

Megatron

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by WhiteWashMan:
get a new system board.
it sounds like the only thing you havent changed or tried..</font>

well you did try the format and re-install
and now "it's not my department" :P

welli'm afraid i'm going to have to re apply for the role of desktop support and show you lot in there what a REAL support tech does .....

" re-aligning the warp feild stress points"
"the warp Field is collasping"
"Quick use the deflector dish to stablise it"
and so on and so forth ....


you'd swear that Brannon Braga and rick bremand came up with that ...

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No !!!!! I will crush you with my Bare hands

Gerry

The best thing is really to get a new board, the ali aladdin was rubbish, even worse than the via(!). I think the secret lies in tweaking the bios. Its a black art really, not always making very much sense. You could try messing with chipset settings in the bios, also memory and pci settings. Or try setting the bios to "fail safe defaults".

WhiteWashMan

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Megatron:

Originally posted by WhiteWashMan:
get a new system board.
it sounds like the only thing you havent changed or tried..</font>

well you did try the format and re-install
and now "it's not my department" :P

welli'm afraid i'm going to have to re apply for the role of desktop support and show you lot in there what a REAL support tech does .....

no, not at all. but what i said is true, if you have eliminated everything else, then it must be something you havent changed. and that woudl be the system board/processor combo. if you think thats passing it off, then its no wonder you got sacked from your last job. its called trouble shooting
and you wouldnt get a job here now. i think they want people who do some work...

Gerry

Yeah, the motherboard is the culprit more often than you might think. You might also check that the processor isnt getting too hot, k6-2's ran fairly hot. Check the heatsink is mounted securely, and that there is thermal compound of some sort between heatsink and chip.

Or as I said before, screw around with the damn bios settings. The problem there might be that you wouldnt know what you are doing, but you can always reset it back to defaults if you mess it up worse than it is already. The bios settings are very important on non-intel chipset boards, and super 7 boards are very fiddly. Its quite possible that the board will work properly if you find the right combination of settings.

My offer of taking a look at the machine for you still stands, I would know fairly quickly if I'm going to be able to fix it, if I figure it's hopeless, there would be no charge at all.