I will start from the beginning and try to make sure I don't miss any details so that the problem can be diagnosed as accurately as possible...
Initial system specs
mobo - MSI RS480M2 (ati chipset based)
cpu - amd 3500+
video card - ati radeon x700 pro
mem - 1gb
harddrive #1 - western digital 160GB SATA (2 partitions - 127GB main & an OS+misc stuff partition)
harddrive #2 - seagate 120GB SATA
power supply - 420 watts
I decided to get a new harddrive since I was running a bit low on space, and the seagate harddrive seemed to be near death (perfectly reasonable considering the wounds UPS gave the computer it was in). I ordered a western digital 250GB SATA harddrive from newegg. When it arrived, I decided to plug all 3 in and transfer all of the seagate's contents to the new harddrive. While doing so, I noticed some odd sound coming from my tower while I was dragging windows around and during a few other activities. Flash advertisements on websites seemed to also cause this sound to constantly occur. Eventually my screen froze during one flash advertisement, and shortly after the ATI drivers kicked in with the VPU recovery (If you're not familiar with VPU recovery, basically the graphics drivers reset the card whenever something goes wrong. By doing this, it prevents the computer from crashing). To let my transfer finish, I stopped web browsing and just let it go on.
After the transfer was complete, I shut the computer down and unplugged the seagate. The odd sound stopped occuring after this. Shortly after, when I was playing world of warcraft, it would freeze the screen for a few seconds randomly and then give me the VPU recover message. I decided it was time to get a new graphics card. A week before I tried to make use of dual monitors and realized that the DVI output port on the video card is messed up, so I hoped it would fix the video card crashing issues as well.
I settled on an MSI geforce 7600 gs from newegg. Before it arrived, I started to notice one more issue with my ATI card. When world of warcraft was open (I run in windowed mode at my desktop resolution, maximized) and windows did any transparency effect, my video would start going at 2-3 frames per second until the effect finished.
When the graphics card arrived, I plugged it in and made use of dual monitors immediately. Transparency also no longer caused issues. I had no crashing/pausing for probably a good 8 hours of playtime... but eventually it started to do one of two things. The thing that is most likely to happen is that the computer will completely lock up for about 20 seconds at a time, sometimes up to 40 seconds, and then recover without saying a word. During this time, there is nothing extraordinary that shows up afterwards on the windows task manager cpu usage. Windows event log viewer also brings up nothing regarding this. The other thing that randomly occurs is a 20 second lockup followed by a blue screen of death with the following error code: 0x000000EA. This also shows nothing in the windows event log. I believe the file mentioned is an nvidia dll, but I forget the specific name.
Since this has started happening, I have tried switching back to the seagate harddrive in place of the new WD 250GB drive, but the freezes/crashes still occur (after the first crash I switched the hardware back). I've tried the latest nvidia drivers available online as well as the ones packaged on the cd that came with my card. I've downloaded the latest drivers for my motherboard's sata chipset.
Yesterday I tried to install a new copy of xp on the 250GB harddrive. After the CD installation upon bootup, it gave me the option of booting up in my old install of windows or my new install. The new install on the 250GB harddrive gives me a black screen that never progresses. After some messing around, I installed a third copy of XP on the first partition of my main harddrive. That one boots and runs a scandisk on the 250GB harddrive, discovering many errors. I still havn't tried the second install since it serves no purpose with the third one working just as far. At this point, it looks like this...
harddrive #1 - western digital 160GB SATA (2 partitions. first partition has latest, functional copy of XP, second partition has oldest install of XP)
harddrive #2 - western digital 250GB SATA (1 partition which contains the black screen install of XP)
Anyway, taking the newest install of windows, I installed the graphics drivers and ran one windows update without issue. After the windows update, I rebooted and went back for another windows update. At this point, microsoft claims that my copy of XP is not genuine and I cannot get any further. As it turns out, I can go back to my oldest install of windows and run windows update without any problem at all, and it's on the same CD key from the same CD. (note: I got the CD from a university computer lab. I can't imagine it not being genuine)
I've tried running a Prime95 stress test over night and it had no problems (about 9 hours). I forget if this is a good memory test, but atleast I know the CPU is fine.
From my sister's suggestion, I decided to turn down the hardware acceleration under advanced display settings - troubleshoot tab. I tried turning it down one notch and left it at that until later. The crashes still occured at that point.
Today I decided to open up the tower and disconnect everything I could and reconnect everything in order to see if I messed up a connection way back when the issues began. I unplugged and checked everything that was connected to the motherboard with the exception of the CPU/heatsink. After booting up, I noticed the odd sound mentioned much earlier that went along with the ATI card. I originally thought it was coming from the graphics card, but it doesn't seem like it now. It still occurs when I drag windows around and such. It also occurs any time that the graphics card has to draw something, like when running World of Warcraft.
I would mess around with the hardware acceleration settings more, but the sound worries me that something is being damaged.
Any help is much appreciated, and thanks for spending the time involved in reading the message already.
Initial system specs
mobo - MSI RS480M2 (ati chipset based)
cpu - amd 3500+
video card - ati radeon x700 pro
mem - 1gb
harddrive #1 - western digital 160GB SATA (2 partitions - 127GB main & an OS+misc stuff partition)
harddrive #2 - seagate 120GB SATA
power supply - 420 watts
I decided to get a new harddrive since I was running a bit low on space, and the seagate harddrive seemed to be near death (perfectly reasonable considering the wounds UPS gave the computer it was in). I ordered a western digital 250GB SATA harddrive from newegg. When it arrived, I decided to plug all 3 in and transfer all of the seagate's contents to the new harddrive. While doing so, I noticed some odd sound coming from my tower while I was dragging windows around and during a few other activities. Flash advertisements on websites seemed to also cause this sound to constantly occur. Eventually my screen froze during one flash advertisement, and shortly after the ATI drivers kicked in with the VPU recovery (If you're not familiar with VPU recovery, basically the graphics drivers reset the card whenever something goes wrong. By doing this, it prevents the computer from crashing). To let my transfer finish, I stopped web browsing and just let it go on.
After the transfer was complete, I shut the computer down and unplugged the seagate. The odd sound stopped occuring after this. Shortly after, when I was playing world of warcraft, it would freeze the screen for a few seconds randomly and then give me the VPU recover message. I decided it was time to get a new graphics card. A week before I tried to make use of dual monitors and realized that the DVI output port on the video card is messed up, so I hoped it would fix the video card crashing issues as well.
I settled on an MSI geforce 7600 gs from newegg. Before it arrived, I started to notice one more issue with my ATI card. When world of warcraft was open (I run in windowed mode at my desktop resolution, maximized) and windows did any transparency effect, my video would start going at 2-3 frames per second until the effect finished.
When the graphics card arrived, I plugged it in and made use of dual monitors immediately. Transparency also no longer caused issues. I had no crashing/pausing for probably a good 8 hours of playtime... but eventually it started to do one of two things. The thing that is most likely to happen is that the computer will completely lock up for about 20 seconds at a time, sometimes up to 40 seconds, and then recover without saying a word. During this time, there is nothing extraordinary that shows up afterwards on the windows task manager cpu usage. Windows event log viewer also brings up nothing regarding this. The other thing that randomly occurs is a 20 second lockup followed by a blue screen of death with the following error code: 0x000000EA. This also shows nothing in the windows event log. I believe the file mentioned is an nvidia dll, but I forget the specific name.
Since this has started happening, I have tried switching back to the seagate harddrive in place of the new WD 250GB drive, but the freezes/crashes still occur (after the first crash I switched the hardware back). I've tried the latest nvidia drivers available online as well as the ones packaged on the cd that came with my card. I've downloaded the latest drivers for my motherboard's sata chipset.
Yesterday I tried to install a new copy of xp on the 250GB harddrive. After the CD installation upon bootup, it gave me the option of booting up in my old install of windows or my new install. The new install on the 250GB harddrive gives me a black screen that never progresses. After some messing around, I installed a third copy of XP on the first partition of my main harddrive. That one boots and runs a scandisk on the 250GB harddrive, discovering many errors. I still havn't tried the second install since it serves no purpose with the third one working just as far. At this point, it looks like this...
harddrive #1 - western digital 160GB SATA (2 partitions. first partition has latest, functional copy of XP, second partition has oldest install of XP)
harddrive #2 - western digital 250GB SATA (1 partition which contains the black screen install of XP)
Anyway, taking the newest install of windows, I installed the graphics drivers and ran one windows update without issue. After the windows update, I rebooted and went back for another windows update. At this point, microsoft claims that my copy of XP is not genuine and I cannot get any further. As it turns out, I can go back to my oldest install of windows and run windows update without any problem at all, and it's on the same CD key from the same CD. (note: I got the CD from a university computer lab. I can't imagine it not being genuine)
I've tried running a Prime95 stress test over night and it had no problems (about 9 hours). I forget if this is a good memory test, but atleast I know the CPU is fine.
From my sister's suggestion, I decided to turn down the hardware acceleration under advanced display settings - troubleshoot tab. I tried turning it down one notch and left it at that until later. The crashes still occured at that point.
Today I decided to open up the tower and disconnect everything I could and reconnect everything in order to see if I messed up a connection way back when the issues began. I unplugged and checked everything that was connected to the motherboard with the exception of the CPU/heatsink. After booting up, I noticed the odd sound mentioned much earlier that went along with the ATI card. I originally thought it was coming from the graphics card, but it doesn't seem like it now. It still occurs when I drag windows around and such. It also occurs any time that the graphics card has to draw something, like when running World of Warcraft.
I would mess around with the hardware acceleration settings more, but the sound worries me that something is being damaged.
Any help is much appreciated, and thanks for spending the time involved in reading the message already.
