Help! My puter is lame and I don;t know why!

[Maxputer]

Hey,
I just recently built a new machine and it is very unstable and I don't know why... any ideas ?

cpu: 1 ghz T-Bird Socket A
mb: Asus A7V
Ram: 192 megs PC100
Vid: Ge-force 2MX
HD: Maxtor 20gb ATA-100
SC: SoundBlast Live
and a no name NIC for my internet connection. I thought the system would be pretty solid but it crahes on me nearly everyday! I'm almost tempted to revert to my old 400mhz k6-2!

My OS is Win98 first edition, and it always crashes! It's a fresh install as it is a new machine...

I wonder is this a memory bandwidth problem should I look to a DDR MB ?
Perhaps my MB's Promise 100 IDE controller is no-good ?

I'm lost! Help would be greatly appreciated

Cheers.

 

[Rifter]

try win2k first b4 you spend anymore money on hardware, if its stable then you know it was win98 causing problems, if it crashes also then its safe to say its hardware.

 

[lazyboy]

Try without the controller and change your NIC. Could also be something to do with the RAM. That sucks just bear with it while you try and figure out what is causing the problem.

 

[knutp]

I believe you got two sticks of ram in it? if you do try with only one at the time and see if there is something wrong with them. Via chipsets are sometimes kind of harsh with the type of ram it's using.

 

[Rifter]

forgot about the ram, is it generic? most athlon boards DO NOT like generic ram, it will work in somr but not others.

 

[Shack70]

Yeah man try this setup...
MB + Processor
1 stick of ram
the Video card
the HD(set as master by itself on 1st controller)
A cd-rom(set as master by itself on 2nd controller)
Now try to format and install Win98. If it still don't work, try using default settings in the bios. If it works you can start adding cards and ram, one at a time. If you suddenly get errors, you found a bad card!

 

[Maxputer]

Hey guys,

Thanx for the awesome Reply time!

I have tried the system with only one stick of ram and if anything it's worse that way...

The NIC Card might be a problem but it's worked fine in other systems...

The OS might be the thing but I'm trying to hold out for XP as it should an improvement over current OS's (hopefully)...

I guess I'll wait for XP and see if it helps, although I'm starting to be skeptical.

I'll try running my HD on regular IDE and see if that helps.

Thanks again for all the advice.

 

[WhatWasIThinking]

What do you mean by "crashes", exactly? Is there a BSOD message of some kind? This won't have anything to do with crashing but make sure DMA is on in Device Manager. I just built a system and got a sandra disk benchmark of 6000 (I was expecting 24000). Oops. I had to manually check DMA.

 

[WhatWasIThinking]

What do you mean by "crashes", exactly? Is there a BSOD message of some kind? This won't have anything to do with crashing but make sure DMA is on in Device Manager. I just built a system and got a sandra disk benchmark of 6000 (I was expecting 24000). Oops. I had to manually check DMA.

 

[bacillus]

have you installed the via 4 in 1 drivers that came on the m/board cd??

 

[dowxp]

what is the crashing error?

 

[tornadobox]

Also, how big is your power supply? You probably want at least 300w.

 

[tornadobox]

Hey, just noticed you have the SBLive/686B setup (at least I think that mobo is 686B)...have you tried upgrading your BIOS?