How do I change the RAM voltage in my Gigabyte EP45 UD3R mobo

[Muse]

Just don't put in any product key.

I'm doubting that Windows 7 would render the machine usable. After all, right now it won't even get into BIOS a lot of the time. When it goes into one of these boot loops there's no stopping it until the machine straightens itself out enough to allow it to get to the stage where DEL works to get into BIOS. When it gets that far, it evidently will continue on to Windows.

I tried something else:

The HDTV program allows configuring the machine to shut down when a recording is completed. Also, suspend. Now, since the machine (when it's working) does go into suspend when asked to and when when asked to come out of suspend does a reboot, I can configure my HDTV program to suspend and when the next recording time come along the machine tries to waken. I tested this, it does happen, but what I'm finding is that instead of booting I get an interminable blank screen. I configured the machine to not ask for my password but that's no help if the boot process won't complete. I thought it was a good idea but it's not working.

I'm wondering if I can get another motherboard, one that has a reputation for acceptable power management in XP. I know they exist, I had a couple. In fact, my MSI KT3 Ultra2 does S3 OK running Windows 2000. Trouble with that board is that it has no SATA controller. I don't know how good the PCI SATA controllers are, I'll have to investigate that. Or, I could look for a more advanced motherboard, maybe an Asus, maybe a 775 system so I can use my CPU, video card and RAM.

Actually, another workaround would be to record HDTV to a HD on the network, maybe an SATA HD attacked to my Synology NAS. That only works if the computer that has my HDTV card is in single CPU mode (i.e. multicore CPUs have to be configured to use only one core). However, the CPU in my MSI system is single core, I believe, an AMD Athlon XP 1700+ CPU (AMD Athlon XP 1700+ Single-Core 1.467 GHz Socket A), so I wouldn't have to throttle the CPU. It's a thought.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Have you ever tried, booting the mobo into XP, WITHOUT any add-on cards installed, and with minimal USB devices connected, and see if it suspends / resumes properly? IOW, strip it down to bare basics. It may not be the board, you know.

Also, check the BIOS, for a setting "Re-initialize VGA BIOS on Resume", or something to that effect. It may need to be enabled.

 

[Muse]

Have you ever tried, booting the mobo into XP, WITHOUT any add-on cards installed, and with minimal USB devices connected, and see if it suspends / resumes properly? IOW, strip it down to bare basics. It may not be the board, you know.

Also, check the BIOS, for a setting "Re-initialize VGA BIOS on Resume", or something to that effect. It may need to be enabled.

I'll try that stuff. Haven't tried removing the cards. That would include the HDTV card and the sound card. I presume I have to leave the video card intact. Right now there is no USB attached whatsoever, including the USB hub I was using.

Also in the system are a floppy drive and an SATA DVD burner. Detach connections for those too?

I don't recall seeing that setting in the Award BIOS, but I'll look for it closely when I can get into the BIOS. Don't think I can get to this stuff tonight. Yes, it's 3 hours earlier here than where you are but I don't stay up that late. I'm kind of burned out on it today.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Also in the system are a floppy drive and an SATA DVD burner. Detach connections for those too?

I wouldn't bother to disconnect those two at first. Unplug your add-on cards first (pull the power cord first!), and then try booting the OS, and suspend / resume.

 

[Muse]

Have you ever tried, booting the mobo into XP, WITHOUT any add-on cards installed, and with minimal USB devices connected, and see if it suspends / resumes properly? IOW, strip it down to bare basics. It may not be the board, you know.

Also, check the BIOS, for a setting "Re-initialize VGA BIOS on Resume", or something to that effect. It may need to be enabled.

Just tried these things to no avail:

Removed the PCI devices (sound card and HDTV card).

Resumed to a light blue blank screen that eventually went black and stayed there.

Looked for that VGA BIOS setting in BIOS, couldn't find anything resembling that.

In addition to the PCI cards being removed, I removed the SATA DVD writer and floppy drive, booted and suspended. Resumed to black screen, period... it's still there, blank, there's no video, Windows has not resumed.

 

[Muse]

I reconnect everything and it goes into the dreaded reboot loop. I remove the USB hub from one of the two USB ports on the front of the case (the hub had nothing connected to it), restart the machine and it succeeds in booting to Windows. The USB hub had been disconnected during the experiments in the last post. AFAIK, that hub has been connected during previous successful boots, but now it appears to be implicated in the boot loop scenario (need more data to confirm this, but it seems quite possibly a factor).