Please help... what's wrong with my desktop?

[Muse]

This is my HDTV PC, a midtower system, it's running Windows XP:

GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3R LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard
Q8200 (2.33Ghz 45nm Core2Quad), copper core stock heatsink/fan
PNY 9600 GSO dual DVI PCI-e GPU
2x2GB GSkill blue DDR2-667 RAM
EVGA SuperNOVA 550 G2 550W 80 Plus Gold Modular Power Supply
MIT MyHD-130 HDTV PCI + daughterboard
Hercules Game Theater XP (GTXP) PCI sound card + breakout box
120GB IDE HDD for OS/Apps
Western Digital 2TB Red 5400 SATA III HDD for secondary storage
Midtower case
2x 120mm fans

I use it mostly for HDTV using its MyHD MDP-130 PCI card/daughterboard DVI output combo. I used to get occasional lockups but I don't think that was due to hardware failure. I think that had to do with software glitches possibly involving the PCI soundcard.

Now, suddenly, the last few days I have something else going on. The occasional lockups I used to get watching HDTV recordings (timeshifting), are different from what I'm getting now. The ones I used to get had everything freezing. My TV is setup to be on one screen and you can still compute normally on a different monitor. When I'd get those lockups, both screens would freeze. If I turned on the 2nd monitor I could see my desktop, mouse frozen. I'd have to reboot, find my place in the recording and resume. This would happen on average, I'd say, every 10 hours of HDTV watching time.

The last few days' problem is much more serious, and renders the machine completely unusable. The syndrome is this:

Watching HDTV, typically the problem starts with sound disappearing and generally no control over the HDTV app although the TV continues. A few seconds to several minutes later the picture freezes and when I turn on the monitor that shows Windows, instead of a locked up desktop, it's solid, either grey, blue grey or medium blue (not BSOD). But there's zero response and I have to reboot. Rebooting can go normally or the boot sequence can be crazy, -- instead of black and white characters on a dark screen, there are yellow/green horizontal lines all over the screen in addition to the white characters, and when this happens Windows fails to fully load and freezes. If I remove power from the PC for a few minutes it will do better. This morning after sitting all night (OFF!) without power removed, I turned on the machine and immediately saw the yellow lines were there at the beginning of the boot process and Windows wouldn't boot... the machine froze while trying to boot Windows.

I tried using my alternate Windows XP install, and it's the same there.

I have an alternate HDTV card/daughterboard combo and switching those hasn't changed things.

Is it likely the motherboard has gone bad? Could it be the PSU? Video card? I have other PSUs but not another video card that would work in this system. The memory has tested fine in the past. I don't know if it's feasible to test the memory the way the machine is behaving.

For another motherboard I would need PCI slot support for the HDTV card. The modem isn't important.

I'm thinking I probably need another MB. Is it possibly something else? Is there something I should try before buying another MB?

 

[Muse]

I just removed power from the machine for almost an hour and then plugged it back in and turned it on. Craziness on screen immediately, yellow horizontal lines and then scrambled meaningless hodge podge of characters and Windows tried to boot, went through the sequence of choosing which of my two Windows XP installs to boot to and after the 3 seconds it automatically chose my default partition (C), and then there was an apparently normal Windows XP boot screen for a few seconds as if Windows was booting normally and then it froze and a few seconds later the screen went blank with ~10% illumination uniformally. Nothing to do at that point but remove from power. I can't even get a boot now, whereas last night I could get it to boot and actually watched over an hour of HDTV. Is the MB dead? Maybe a failed capacitor or something?

 

[UsandThem]

The motherboard would be my first guess, and what I'd focus on first.

 

[Muse]

The motherboard would be my first guess, and what I'd focus on first.

Thanks. Well, I guess that means buy a new one. I needed to do that to restore my 2nd midtower anyway, so no skin lost if that's not the problem!!! Any recommendation for a system with PCI slots appreciated. I can build systems (have done it several times) but I don't know my way around the ins and outs of parts compatibility. Ability to reuse some of the components would be helpful, obviously. This time I'm willing to try to use the onboard sound because I have suspected for years that the lip synch issues in HDTV I'm having are partly due to my Hercules PCI soundcard/breakout box solution.

 

[Ken g6]

I have other PSUs but not another video card that would work in this system.

You could try removing the video card and using the onboard graphics. You won't get very far trying to watch HDTV that way, but it would narrow down the problems.

I can't even get a boot now, whereas last night I could get it to boot and actually watched over an hour of HDTV. Is the MB dead?

You could also examine the motherboard for bulging capacitors.

 

[Smoove910]

I am guessing videocard is going out... do you have another to swap in and test?

 

[UsandThem]

Thanks. Well, I guess that means buy a new one. I needed to do that to restore my 2nd midtower anyway, so no skin lost if that's not the problem!!! Any recommendation for a system with PCI slots appreciated. I can build systems (have done it several times) but I don't know my way around the ins and outs of parts compatibility. Ability to reuse some of the components would be helpful, obviously.

Are you looking to resuse the same CPU? If so, you will likely need to buy a used LGA775 motherboard.

PCI has been all but discontinued after LGA1151 (Sky Lake) was launched, and I've personally only seen a PCI slot on maybe 5 motherboards since then.

 

[Ken g6]

Thanks. Well, I guess that means buy a new one.

Since you're coming from Windows XP, I'd be curious what software you want to use for HDTV? I do a lot of HDTV recording, but in Linux, with scripts I write myself. There are more friendly interfaces in Linux, so are you looking for that or a newer version of Windows?

Edit: I should also point out that I use a USB tuner if that helps open up your hardware options.

 

[Muse]

Developments:

An hour later or so I plug the machine in and start it. Immediately crazy video at beginning of boot sequence, yellow/green lines, garbled nutty text but it goes to boot options and offers to Start Normally, which you see when Windows crashed or something. This time although it was hard to read the options with the crazy display, I chose one of the Safe Mode selections, couldn't make out which it was. The screen looked crazy with a bright blue neon but it booted into Safe Mode and in accordance with instructions I went into Control Panel and looked for something wrong. Safe Mode looked normal, to my surprise. I had no idea where to look other than Device Manager for something wrong. I'm actually using the machine right now, hope it doesn't crash!!!

Saw nothing weird in Device Manager, looked at the video card aplet there and it just said it couldn't evaluate in Safe Mode. So, I reboot, still looked crazy but then went into the OTHER installation of WinXP, not the one I entered in Safe Mode. I'm still in that booting of Windows and after ~45 minutes it still seems OK, have no idea why. I even have the HDTV app working, no crash.

Did Safe Mode (in the other OS install, no less), maybe fix something? Wonder if it will boot normally now without the crazy stuff on the screen before Windows starts loading.

 

[Muse]

So, I'm editing the last post (while on that machine!) and it locks up (I'm using a different PC to make this post). I rebooted into Safe Mode and try to run SFC /Scannow and it won't, says it can't access the RPC Server IIRC, so I reboot into normal Windows, IIRC normal video the whole way (hurray), and go to command prompt and run SFC /Scannow and it wants my Windows XP SP3 install disk and I put that in and the scan is proceeding. I think it conceivable that a utility I installed the other day hashed my system, the program was Cool Timer. Hmm. Well, maybe the mobo isn't history. Is it possible that some software was screwed up that can be fixed with SFC /Scannow? I don't see that crazy video when the boot process starts. I half expect the scan going on now will freeze.

 

[Muse]

You could try removing the video card and using the onboard graphics. You won't get very far trying to watch HDTV that way, but it would narrow down the problems.


You could also examine the motherboard for bulging capacitors.

Whoa! Was typing in a response (using the problem PC) and it went crazy a moment, not lockup but the browser itself disappeared. Hmm.

Well, to continue where I was... I figure might be possible to watch HDTV without video card because my HDTV cards have their own video processing going on.

Yesterday I did think to look for bulging capacitors on MB... I have the case open, have had it open since working on some problems some months ago! Didn't see anything, then saw a tiny capacitor sitting on the bottom of the case, WTF! Looking, I see it looks like the ones on my HDTV card. That card is a MyHD 130 card and I have a MyHD 120 card (in a dead system, that needs a new MB) and I swapped the cards but that seemed to have no effect AFAIK on the problems. I see where the little capacitor broke off the MyHD 130 PCI card. Possibly that card will work anyway. I think I must have been using it for quite some time with that capacitor broken off. It's cylinder about the size of a large pea.

Right now I am using the problem system to type this message. Completed SFC/ Scannow and rebooted, so far so good after about 15 minutes...

SFC /Scannow didn't report whether it made any changes, it just finished and disappeared and left me in Windows and I rebooted just to see if the system seemed to be behaving normally and it did seem to boot normally.

 

[Muse]

Since you're coming from Windows XP, I'd be curious what software you want to use for HDTV? I do a lot of HDTV recording, but in Linux, with scripts I write myself. There are more friendly interfaces in Linux, so are you looking for that or a newer version of Windows?

Edit: I should also point out that I use a USB tuner if that helps open up your hardware options.

My intention is to use an HD Homerun to make HD captures (it can make two simultaneously) and use the MyHD system (cards and application) to watch those captures. It's possible to watch a capture while it is happening, from the beginning or anywhere in the capture, so I am told, using the MyHD system. Many people are doing that successfully. I haven't gotten this working yet, it's on my agenda. Meantime, I've been using the MyHD card itself to make the captures. The MyHD people instituted timeshifting after I bought my initial card (the 120), and I love that feature and using it 99% of the time.

The HD Homerun connects to the system via ethernet to my router. I have one of my rooftop antennas connected to it, the other connected to my MyHD card.

 

[Ken g6]

I used to have an HD Homerun. (I gave it away - too many digital glitches for me.) It didn't require another capture card to watch recordings from it. So you don't need a PCI slot, then?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Rebooting can go normally or the boot sequence can be crazy, -- instead of black and white characters on a dark screen, there are yellow/green horizontal lines all over the screen in addition to the white characters, and when this happens Windows fails to fully load and freezes. If I remove power from the PC for a few minutes it will do better. This morning after sitting all night (OFF!) without power removed, I turned on the machine and immediately saw the yellow lines were there at the beginning of the boot process and Windows wouldn't boot... the machine froze while trying to boot Windows.

Sounds like the video card is shot. Send me $15 Paypal for postage, and I'll send you an XFX R5 230 card, which is VLIW/TeraScale, not GCN, but if you're using XP, you should probably be able to find drivers. It's also passive.

Edit: Brand new, and if it doesn't fix it, I'll refund the Paypal, and you can keep the card.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Did Safe Mode (in the other OS install, no less), maybe fix something? Wonder if it will boot normally now without the crazy stuff on the screen before Windows starts loading.

Yesterday I did think to look for bulging capacitors on MB... I have the case open, have had it open since working on some problems some months ago! Didn't see anything, then saw a tiny capacitor sitting on the bottom of the case, WTF! Looking, I see it looks like the ones on my HDTV card. That card is a MyHD 130 card and I have a MyHD 120 card (in a dead system, that needs a new MB) and I swapped the cards but that seemed to have no effect AFAIK on the problems. I see where the little capacitor broke off the MyHD 130 PCI card. Possibly that card will work anyway. I think I must have been using it for quite some time with that capacitor broken off. It's cylinder about the size of a large pea.

Does the PC boot normally, without that card (that is missing a capacitor)? That would be something to test out.

 

[Muse]

Does the PC boot normally, without that card (that is missing a capacitor)? That would be something to test out.

Well, the PC seems to be booting normally now, after running SFC/ Scannow. The card with the missing capacitor isn't in the system right now. The system wasn't booting normally with and without that card in there, so removing it doesn't seem to be a factor. It would be interesting to see if the damaged card works in the system, and my guess is that it will and I suspect that I won't detect a problem. The newer card is significantly more sensitive and I suppose there are sundry improvements. The cards have obvious different components just glancing at them side by side.

Swapping the cards is kinda a PITA. I guess I'll be doing it, though, but it's not real easy. There are 3 cables to remove and reattach (on each machine) and I have to remove the internal COMM port cable to get the HDTV cards in/out of my main midtower. I'm thinking that that cable probably was the culprit in hacking off that capacitor some time ago. Just noticed the capacitor on the bottom of the case yesterday, though.

 

[Muse]

So far so good today, and I watched about 3 hours of HDTV using the system. There was one lockup/reboot, but that went quite like the ones I've been having occasionally for several years, so no reason to think that something's failing now. I have to think (?) that there's some driver(s) that are part of Windows that run at the beginning of the boot process that got corrupted somehow that were fixed by running SFC /SCANNOW or possibly by running in Safe Mode before I ran that function... or both, I'm pretty mystified, but right now I am not seeing the quite bizarre video anomalies that I saw every time I booted last night and this morning before I went into Safe Mode on a hunch.

 

[Muse]

I used to have an HD Homerun. (I gave it away - too many digital glitches for me.) It didn't require another capture card to watch recordings from it. So you don't need a PCI slot, then?

Well, I figure I do need another motherboard, in fact two would be a good idea. The one in my backup midtower is fried and the one in my main midtower has never woken up from S3 suspend, which is a huge problem. Possibly running Windows 7 with the machine would resolve that, I haven't tried that yet.

PCI slots are something I want because I want to use the MyHD cards and app to view the video captures that are made using the HD Homerun. This is very commonly done these days and is said to be very successful. The advantages include the integrated included remote control of the MyHD and it's IR receiver, the fact that the HD Homerun can make two recordings simultaneously and that it can work across the network. The MyHD cards only use network connections if the CPU in the machine is single core. Turning off multicore is an option, but not everyone wants to do that.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, I figure I do need another motherboard, in fact two would be a good idea. The one in my backup midtower is fried and the one in my main midtower has never woken up from S3 suspend, which is a huge problem. Possibly running Windows 7 with the machine would resolve that, I haven't tried that yet.

PCI slots are something I want because I want to use the MyHD cards and app to view the video captures that are made using the HD Homerun.

Let me know if you need somehelp picking out boards. GL finding them with more than a single PCI slot these days, though.

I think that you just need to update your kit. And I'm confused, why you need a PCI card to VIEW HD recordings, doesn't and modern iGPU play back HD video flawlessly these days?

 

[VirtualLarry]

it's running Windows XP:

damn, dude, time to upgrade? Ya think? Modern iGPUs can play back HD now, you don't need a PCI card and special drivers.

Get a Media Center remote and a USB IR dongle, if you need a remote.

 

[Muse]

Let me know if you need somehelp picking out boards. GL finding them with more than a single PCI slot these days, though.

I think that you just need to update your kit. And I'm confused, why you need a PCI card to VIEW HD recordings, doesn't and modern iGPU play back HD video flawlessly these days?

damn, dude, time to upgrade? Ya think? Modern iGPUs can play back HD now, you don't need a PCI card and special drivers.

Get a Media Center remote and a USB IR dongle, if you need a remote.

Yeah, I don't know. But I do know that a lot of people are using the MyHD PCI cards with its application and IR remote for their OTA HDTV recording solution, often provided by the HD Homerun connected in the network. A Media Center remote might not have the same convenience. I wouldn't know. I've been using a MyHD card since 2004, got the newer version a few years later. It's the only HDTV I have ever used. I was immediately awe struck by the picture and convenience. Moving to a new solution is obviously possible. Um, but why? I figure I can beat the few problems I see now one way or another:

1. Mobos with PCI slots
2. S3 support
3. lip synch issue, which some people don't ever have, so I figure I can work that out, very likely by abandoning my sound card
4. Lockups. I think some people don't get them with the MyHD cards/app.

What I really should do is have a totally simple HDTV box, install nothing inessential, use it for HDTV, that's it. It's said to lessen problems tremendously.

 

[VirtualLarry]

HD Homerun Prime (networked OTA HD decoder, I think?), and a Roku box? I think that's what many people use.

I've been looking at the new Gigabyte Brix unit, with the quad-core Goldmont CPU/APU, the one that does 4K60 native, quad-core, 2.6Ghz, 10W TDP. Should be a fairly impressive "TV box", just add SSD, RAM, and OS, and connect to a network tuner. (Oh yeah, and with an IR remote.)

 

[Muse]

Last 2-3 days, little to no trouble. Today, I turn on the machine and Windows didn't successfully boot. I'd left the machine to boot, came back 5 minutes later and instead of Windows on the monitor it was a monochrome light blue-grey necessitating a reset. Then I got the crazy screen scene with the short horizontal yellow-green lines followed by scrambled white letters on a black screen, like last week. Windows would not boot. I turned off the machine, unplugged power for a few minutes, plugged back in and pressed the start button and same deal, crazy screen. I then (as last week) booted in Safe Mode (pressed F8 after beginning of boot process) and was given the option of several modes of booting and like last week, I couldn't make out much, but obviously the top one was Safe Mode, no networking (don't know what that would be about, personally), and Windows seemed to go into Safe Mode "normally." I go into Device Manager and unlike last time when it looked "normal" this time a few things showed difficulties. One was my scanner driver not being installed and the other a couple of devices I had no idea what they were, they had the same name, "Human Interface??." I tried to install the scanner driver but it couldn't find it. Maybe not a good idea in the first place, no matter, I restarted and Windows appeared to start "normally" this time. I'm not running SFC /SCANNOW this time, I have no proof that that did anything last time, maybe it was starting Windows in Safe Mode that sorted out some problem.

Anyway, something's screwed up, don't know what but right now the system appears to be usable, I'm using it to type this post. I will watch a 3 hour HDTV DVR recording I hope to make in a couple of hours, but will not set up the machine to start by Alarm, I will just leave it on, at least I know that Windows is booted. I will instead leave it on the 2+ hours until the recording should auto-start.

Yesterday I watched around 7 hours of HDTV on the system with no anomalous behavior whatsoever, so I was hopeful that was behind me. Now I know that something is afoot, I just don't know what it is.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Shrug, maybe the mobo is dying after all. Have you tried a different / new (to this rig) graphics card?

The fact that it tried to re-install some HID (Human Interface Device) drivers, leads me to believe that the registry may be getting corrupted.

Do you run regular "Registry Cleaners"? (Maybe stop doing so, if so.)

How old is your HDD? Have you run some SMART self-tests, checked SMART data for re-allocated or pending sectors? Maybe some sectors on your HDD are failing, and SFC /scannow, is re-writing the corrupted .DLLs and whatnot back onto new spots on your drive, and then they're getting blown away by failing HDD corruption again, a few days later. Just a theory.

 

[Muse]

Mobo, maybe, graphics card, well, I don't have another. Well, maybe a PCI really really really old one, but would have to comb through my stuff. That one you offered me for postage, would it work in this rig?

I don't run registry cleaners as a rule, nothing recently certainly. Nothing since long before this came up.

The 120GB boot drive is old but crystaldiskinfo says it's good. The data drive is a pretty new 2TB WD, I think there's close to no chance that's involved in the problem.

In a day or two I'm going to reinistall Windows XP in the C partition, I can't get my HDTV app to work in it anymore. I think I'll install XP in the 3rd partition too, which I had set aside for a 3rd install when I partitioned the HD. Never got around to that before, but man, having alternate boot partitions really helps when something like this comes up... I always do it on my midtower systems.