This is happening with my wife's computer. Her rig is an MSI Socket A board (cannot remember model) with an Athlon XP 2400+ processor and 512MB of Ram.
First, a little explanation - Back several months ago, a big thunderstorm rolled through and sat over our apartment, hell bent on destruction. After several lightning pops, it finally scores a hit on the cable line. The surge races through, destroys the cable router, and does a serious number on her computer. Fried the mobo, killed a hard drive, and ate her sound card and NIC. Was lucky enough to get a new board (the MSI one) and get her back up and running the next day. Board had everything on it (Sound, LAN), so I just tossed her other cards aside and pressed on.
After this point, whenever she played a music CD through her CD-Rom drive, it would stutter and halt. So, I would rip everything to MP3 for her and she would play them that way. The drive ran like crap, so I replaced it, but same problem. Also, anytime anything had to access the CD (especially after insertion), it would temporarily hang the system up.
Well, over the weekend, one of her other hard drives started making awful noises. During this time, whenever she would play an MP3 from that drive, it would sound like rice krispies were in her speakers. We moved the MP3s to a good drive, but same thing happened. Also, whenever she did anything in an application (type in Word, scroll in Acrobat, scroll in IE), it would crackle. Finally, recognizing the imminent failure of the drive, I moved all the data off and removed it. It is now on my desk, across the room from her PC.
Well, now, it is still crackling. However, now, it only does it when the computer is working. If she has Winamp or WMP playing the MP3s, and nothing else is going on, they play fine. However, you start Word or Acrobat or IE, or anything, it crackles during the initial start up, while it is caching, I presume. Once the application is open, everything is fine, music plays good.
I am thinking there may be a bad IDE cable in the machine, and need to just rip them all out and replace them. Everything else in the case seems to be ok, but I am at my wits end on this. Any other suggestions?
First, a little explanation - Back several months ago, a big thunderstorm rolled through and sat over our apartment, hell bent on destruction. After several lightning pops, it finally scores a hit on the cable line. The surge races through, destroys the cable router, and does a serious number on her computer. Fried the mobo, killed a hard drive, and ate her sound card and NIC. Was lucky enough to get a new board (the MSI one) and get her back up and running the next day. Board had everything on it (Sound, LAN), so I just tossed her other cards aside and pressed on.
After this point, whenever she played a music CD through her CD-Rom drive, it would stutter and halt. So, I would rip everything to MP3 for her and she would play them that way. The drive ran like crap, so I replaced it, but same problem. Also, anytime anything had to access the CD (especially after insertion), it would temporarily hang the system up.
Well, over the weekend, one of her other hard drives started making awful noises. During this time, whenever she would play an MP3 from that drive, it would sound like rice krispies were in her speakers. We moved the MP3s to a good drive, but same thing happened. Also, whenever she did anything in an application (type in Word, scroll in Acrobat, scroll in IE), it would crackle. Finally, recognizing the imminent failure of the drive, I moved all the data off and removed it. It is now on my desk, across the room from her PC.
Well, now, it is still crackling. However, now, it only does it when the computer is working. If she has Winamp or WMP playing the MP3s, and nothing else is going on, they play fine. However, you start Word or Acrobat or IE, or anything, it crackles during the initial start up, while it is caching, I presume. Once the application is open, everything is fine, music plays good.
I am thinking there may be a bad IDE cable in the machine, and need to just rip them all out and replace them. Everything else in the case seems to be ok, but I am at my wits end on this. Any other suggestions?
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