I ordered a bunch of parts to build my computer from (more or less) scratch and got them in this week. This is the first time I've built a computer like this, but i've changed the hardware numerous times in other computers. I had an experienced friend help me with the parts that I didn't understand.
Here is what it's composed of:
Pentium 4 2.26ghz + heatsink (retail)
Gigabyte GA-8IHXP (850e Chipset)
2 x 256mb pc1066 Kingston RDRAM
40gb IBM Desktar (7200 rpm ATA100)
80gb Western Digital (7200 rpm ATA100)
Chieftec Aluminum Dragon w/ 430 Enermax Power Supply
All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500
Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum
Creative 16x DVD Rom
and 4 x 80 mm case fans
Now, here's the problem:
I got everything in the computer and hooked it all up (even got the LEDs to work correctly!) and I installed Windows XP Pro. I installed all the immediately necessary (and updated) drivers for my chipset and other hardware. Everything seemed fine until I tried to play Warcraft 3 and it immediately froze and my computer rebooted. When I got back into Windows, it blamed the crash on the Radeon drivers. This continued to happen occasionally whenever I ran graphic accelerated programs in full screen (example: games, winamp visualizations, etc.).
So, as I was reinstalling the video card drivers, it warns me that my hard drives are not running in DMA mode. I checked earlier and they were running at UDMA 5 .. now they were in PIO mode and everything slowed down. On my old computer, reinstalling Windows was the only way i found to fix this.. so I did, to no avail. In fact, this is where things really went down hill...
Windows XP took almost 2 hours to reinstall, a far cry from the 40 mins it should have taken. I couldn't figure it out, but I thought it was my dvd drive failing. Once Windows XP restarted, it took almost 5 minutes to boot. Everything was INCREDIBLY slow. MUCH slower than the 500mhz P3 that I'm upgrading from. It would freeze very often and reboot itself. A couple of times, XP would Blue Screen at boot. I don't know what went wrong.
I hadn't changed the bios since I first ran my computer, so I don't think it could have been that. Also, I'm using the video card, sound card, cd drive and hard drives in my old computer now.. I checked them out, and they're all functioning fine. So that basically narrows it down to the RAM, the motherboard, or the processor.. I can't get online to download anything that would let me check to see what was wrong, and I'm afraid I don't know what to do.
When I checked the Bios, the CPU said it was running around 40 or so degrees celsius (about 105 - 115 degrees F, if i recall correctly.) and my case was about 75 - 80 degrees F (I forgot exactly what it was, .). My fans were all running at around 2700 rpm. I tried disassembling and rebuilding it from scratch again, and formatting the hdds.. but nothing helps.
Can someone please help me figure out what happened?
Here is what it's composed of:
Pentium 4 2.26ghz + heatsink (retail)
Gigabyte GA-8IHXP (850e Chipset)
2 x 256mb pc1066 Kingston RDRAM
40gb IBM Desktar (7200 rpm ATA100)
80gb Western Digital (7200 rpm ATA100)
Chieftec Aluminum Dragon w/ 430 Enermax Power Supply
All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500
Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum
Creative 16x DVD Rom
and 4 x 80 mm case fans
Now, here's the problem:
I got everything in the computer and hooked it all up (even got the LEDs to work correctly!) and I installed Windows XP Pro. I installed all the immediately necessary (and updated) drivers for my chipset and other hardware. Everything seemed fine until I tried to play Warcraft 3 and it immediately froze and my computer rebooted. When I got back into Windows, it blamed the crash on the Radeon drivers. This continued to happen occasionally whenever I ran graphic accelerated programs in full screen (example: games, winamp visualizations, etc.).
So, as I was reinstalling the video card drivers, it warns me that my hard drives are not running in DMA mode. I checked earlier and they were running at UDMA 5 .. now they were in PIO mode and everything slowed down. On my old computer, reinstalling Windows was the only way i found to fix this.. so I did, to no avail. In fact, this is where things really went down hill...
Windows XP took almost 2 hours to reinstall, a far cry from the 40 mins it should have taken. I couldn't figure it out, but I thought it was my dvd drive failing. Once Windows XP restarted, it took almost 5 minutes to boot. Everything was INCREDIBLY slow. MUCH slower than the 500mhz P3 that I'm upgrading from. It would freeze very often and reboot itself. A couple of times, XP would Blue Screen at boot. I don't know what went wrong.
I hadn't changed the bios since I first ran my computer, so I don't think it could have been that. Also, I'm using the video card, sound card, cd drive and hard drives in my old computer now.. I checked them out, and they're all functioning fine. So that basically narrows it down to the RAM, the motherboard, or the processor.. I can't get online to download anything that would let me check to see what was wrong, and I'm afraid I don't know what to do.
When I checked the Bios, the CPU said it was running around 40 or so degrees celsius (about 105 - 115 degrees F, if i recall correctly.) and my case was about 75 - 80 degrees F (I forgot exactly what it was, .). My fans were all running at around 2700 rpm. I tried disassembling and rebuilding it from scratch again, and formatting the hdds.. but nothing helps.
Can someone please help me figure out what happened?
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