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New System + Vista Freezes

H

Herrterror

Junior Member
ASUS M@A-VMHDMI in Athenatech100c w/ stock 200w power supply
3800 AM2 w/ stock heatsink, fan replaced by Nexus silent 80mm
1gb WINTEC AMPO DDR2 800 cheapo RAM
250 gb Seagate hdd, worked perfectly in another system.

Just built the system, installed Vista, plan to use it as a small, quiet HTPC.

No difficulty installing Vista, but now it freezes typically 15-20 minutes after each boot, no matter whether idle or full usage. No response, have to reboot. Get windows safe mode window on restart but no other messages.

CPU temp reaches max 50c so that shouldn't be it. I have a list of stuff to try, just throwing this out to see if it could be anything else before I spend more money.

-Reseat heatsink/reapply grease (I changed the fan on the heatsink after it was seated)
-Try a different OS, like Media Center 05 or just XP
-RAM - not enough? or too cheapo? I get no error screens and it happens whether memory is taxed or not. Obviously, Vista only recognizes 800-something MB out of 1gb
-Replace power supply - which sounds most likely to me, but want to save the money if possible.

Could it be anything else?

Thanks for any info in advance!
 
oh man, 200w power!?!?!?!?!?
that would be the first thing i would switch out
At least, AT LEAST, get a 400w, or 500w/

Ram, sounds ok, 1gb is enough for day to day
the rest really shouldn't matter.
 
I guess what I'm asking is not "Is this enough juice for a power supply?" but "If the power supply was faulty, could it result in Windows Vista freezing like this?" Remember that it's an HTPC, which implies small form-factor, low-noise, and often low-power. They don't really make power supplies in the 400-500w range for microatx cases. Note that there's no video card - I'm deliberately running off the onboard video.
 
Its possible that you have a memory leak. Most likely from bad ram. Vista uses a lot of it during idle, trying to predict what you are going to do next. If for some reason you have a bad stick, Vista will find it. Espcially since it is freezing after the same amount of time each instance. Try swapping out hardware if you can. I would imagine its not vista.
 
If Vista only sees 800MB of 1GB something's probably wrong. I don't think I've ever seen Windows detect substantially less than what you actually have unless there's a problem with one of your sticks.

I'm betting bad memory. Try running Memtest86.
 
Originally posted by: Fraggable
If Vista only sees 800MB of 1GB something's probably wrong. I don't think I've ever seen Windows detect substantially less than what you actually have unless there's a problem with one of your sticks.

I'm betting bad memory. Try running Memtest86.
Click to expand...
I know it's probably not the case, but at least with 965, the x3000 IGP can allocate up to 320MB of ram I think. So depending on the chipset, it might just be taking that much.
 
Try setting Vista's power options to High Performance so it doesn't try going to sleep or suspend or hibernate or etc. What happens now?
 
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