A whole lotta problems

[mattbern]

Hi there. I recently bought a new computer but I'm having a whole lot of problems with it at different levels. The specs are as follows:

OS: Win2k Pro + SP3 + all updates
AMD Athlong XP 2200+ T-bred core
Volcano9 HSF
MSI KT3 Ultra2 mobo w/o RAID
RAM 512MB Corsair XMS3000
MSI GeForce4 Ti4200 128MB RAM w/o VIVO
Creative SB Audigy OEM
"M$ Natural Keyboard OEM USB only" <--
some mouse
some burner
some hdd
somee dvd rom
etc.



First problem that really bugs me is the keyboard. If for some reason my computer crashes, right from the beginning it won't detect the keyboard anymore, not even before OS load up. So naturally I get a keyboard error (press F1 to continue) and there is NO way to fix it. I've tried plugging the keyboard into a different USB port, resetting, repowering, nothing works. The only way to fix it is to plug in an old PS2 keyboard, get back in Win2k, plug out the PS2, plug in the USB kb, windows recognizes it, everyone will be happy until the next crash. That's prob#1.

Problem number 2 is that sometimes for a very strange reason, after I shut down the computer, it turns itself back on after like 2 seconds! I've disabled wake on lan, and everything else in BIOS but the problem persists. (weird).

Last but not least is my worst nighmare. It's happened twice and I'm sure it'll happen again. After my first installation of Win2k and other apps, I attempted installing BlackIce (firewall). It installed fine, but after about 2 minutes windows just crashed. It just booted itself. No BSOD no nothing. I said OK no problem. It booted back into Win2k, I uninstalled BlackIce, attempted unrarring a few things, bam, crashed again in the same manner. Back to Win2k, second attempt to unrar, poof, crashed again in 2 minutes. The only way to keep it from crashing was to just not touch anything. Since it was still a fresh OS installation I figured what the heck, I'll just reinstall the OS over. And I did. I had no more of this crashing problem until I attempted installing the SB Audigy's first Driver Update Pack available from creative.com. I installed it, it asked me to reboot, I rebooted, before even the OS was loaded, I got a bluescreen telling me there was something wrong somewhere (i'm pretty sure the error message contained the word IRQ) and asked me to remove anything I had recently installed. It was definitely the Audigy driver that was causing it. So I go into safe mode, remove all the updated drivers, blah blah, yadda yadda... I finally managed to load up Win2k with no problems using the old drivers, but guess what... It crashed on me again (the same type of crash that BlackIce possibly caused). So again my Win2k went into a very unstable state where it booted itself every 2 minutes if there was activity. I'm at work now, planning to reinstall the OS yet again when I get back home.

Anyways, if anyone has ANY idea whatsoever what might be causing all this please help me out. It might be a single error that's causing all of this but then they could be all independent problems. Alright... back to work.

Thanks...
-Matt

 

[rkoenn]

It could have any number of causes. The first thing I would consider is the memory. I have had systems that install Windows correctly and then have spurious but consistent crashes. Quite a number of times it ended up apparently being memory. I, however, have a small computer business on the side and have the parts available to troubleshoot such problems. I recently had a system that would run fine on most things but would crash on MP3s and Spider Solitaire. Didn't know what it was and tried changing out everything but the drives with no luck. Finally, being the last item, I changed out the Duron 1 GHz CPU and the system was rock solid after. That was the first time I can remember ever having a "bad" CPU. And it only acted up on certain apps. Anyway, you probably have no simple method to troubleshoot as parts changeout is probably the only realistic way to isolate it. Do try going into the BIOS though and setting all the settings to conservative values. Then try memory next and so on down the line. Good luck!