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Problems Persist... Completely baffled!!! Help Please!!!

V

Vortex22

Diamond Member
I posted a thread a while ago about weird lockups on my 2 month old computer.(link to specs in sig) It locked up or rebooted seemingly randomly... If it locked, small horizontal lines about 1 inch long would appear across the top of the screen, this could happen at any time: during windows boot up, on the desktop, during a game, while shutting down... etc. I switched out the video card, that being my 1st hunch as the problem... but it continued with the replacment card in. I reseated everything in the computer, checked the temperatures, voltages, everything was normal. I ran a memory test (launched from a disk and ran when windows was not loaded) and it got messed up during testing. Weird hex characters appeared all over the screen and text was garbled. I could make out however, that it said something like "Unexpected exception, halting." The computer had not locked up this time though for some reason.

Thinking that the RAM was the problem, and having no extra to test with, I went ahead and RMA'ed it with newegg. After receiving the new ram 2 days ago, the computer has been running flawlessly, until now. The same problems that I was having before have started up again... It locked up and displayed the lines one time during windows start up, it rebooted while playing a game (even though I have disabled auto reboot in winxp), and locked again when windows was shutting down.

I have absolutely no idea what is causing this strange behavior and am about to go insane.. someone PLEASE HELP ME, I AM BEGGING YOU!! I want my computer to work again! :|

Edit: Original thread
 
One more thing. It seems to happen more often if I go into a game. For example, if I were to boot up Morrowind right now and start playing, it would probably happen within a minute or so, while it can be random on the desktop. This makes it look like the problem is heat-realted, but the cpu never gets dangerously hot. The highest I have ever seen it get during gameplay is 135 degrees (it idles at about 123)... I know it's a little hot, but it is an Athlon XP 1800+, temps like that shouldn't be causing problems like this, should they?
 
From what I have read so far , you've done basically what most would have done in your situation.

Do you have another mobo you can try and also maybe a PSU ?

Also have you tried updating your bios for your motherboard if there is one ?
 
I don't have a spare PSU or motherboard around anywhere...
The PSU is a 400W Antec, and all the voltage readings are ok. I really don't think that is the problem (but who knows?)
I really hope it isn't the mobo 🙁

I guess there isn't really much else I can do without any other spare parts to swap out. I'm gonna go take everything but the cpu, mobo, hdd, and vid card out and see if I can figure something out.
 
You might, just for kicks, try forcing your FSB speed down to 100 and/or setting all your RAM timings as slow as possible. If that fixes it, you're probably looking at a bum motherboard.

Peace,
will
 
I just got done playing around with it again...
I started with the vid card and nic out and everything else in. I started it up and ran 3dmark for a few minutes, then rebooted it and tried it again, attempting to reproduce the problem. It rebooted once (on its own) while trying to run 3dmark.
I unplugged the dvd drive (I had simply forgotten to before)... did about 3 more runs with no problems.
Plugged in the sound card (dvd still unplugged)... no problems after a few runs.
Plugged in nic... still no probs.

Although it seem weird that it could be the dvd drive... I went and plugged it in, thinking that I had found the problem.
I booted up and.... had no problems 😕
Rebooted, same, again, same, again.. etc.

So now I am sitting here typing on this comp with no problems, more confused than ever.
I would have been slightly satisfied if I hadn't had any problems, but that one reboot worries me and I am betting that the problem isn't gone.

Where's the tylenol? 😕 😉
 
OK if it looks like the DVD drive ,what is your drive set to ?

If it is slave/master try changing it to cable select , i've noticed some devices of mine don't like slave/master and work better with cable select.
 
Yet another strange occurrence!
I ran memtest-86 again just for the heck of it (I hadn't done it since I received the replacement ram), and what happened? The exact same thing that happened the last time! The test ran for a while, then at 42% complete, the same place as last time (with the old ram), I got an "Unexpected Interrupt - halting". The test error count was still at zero, but it showed some things under the message, it seemed to have gotten a "divide" error, and it showed a bunch of hex characters under the label "stack" (I'm assuming memory locations?). The error code was "00000000".
Now, how the hell does this memory test mess up in the exact same place as it did with the old ram? Is it possible that newegg repacked the ram I sent them and sent it back to me? Or could some other supernatural phonomenon be causing this? Could it possibly be something other than the memory if newegg sent me new ram? The cpu maybe? (please god no!)

I am so totally beyond confused right now.
 
Hey, I didn't finish reading the posts on this so I hope it doesn't turn out to be memory, or the memory slot(s) on the mobo, but I did encounter a very similar issue a few years ago with an Abit BH6 mobo. Seemed as if the system would lock up randomly after playing a game for a few minutes (but the system would stay up and work fine so long as I wasn't playing a game).

I found out the problem on Abit's website and fixed it - apparantly I had placed my new (at the time) Ethernet card in the wrong slot - and I had the sound card in the wrong place. Was strange to me...

So, it could be something like that - even placement of PCI cards can do wierd things as well...

Good luck!

Mahogeny
 
Your temps seem a little high, and while I agree with you, it is not reason to be worried about damaging anything, I tend to get worried when my temps on my XP1700+ start to get anywhere near 115 F. Have you tried any software to reduce the temps of the CPU?(VCOOL is the one I use and it seems to help). Have you tried running the comp with the case open and seeing if this helps any? Did you use enough Acrtic silver thermal interface grease? (Did you know that AMD reccomends a thermal pad rather than thermal grease?)
If you can rule out the overheating of the CPU, then I would say that it may be a weak component of the mobo.
 
I saw some similar symptoms on a system that ended up having a bad motherboard (all the other parts are working happily in other systems). The temps are a little high, but I've run my Duron 1.0ghz higher than that with no problems so I doubt they're the cause.

Peace,
will
 
All sources seem to be pointing to a bad motherboard at this time. 🙁
I guess I'll have to try to rma it... I hope newegg doesn't get too pissed off since I just returned some ram.

One thing that I'm worried about is that the motherboard was somehow killing the ram (which is why it worked fine for a day after I got new ram), and I now have a bad mobo and ram! I hope that isn't the case though.
 
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