I have a Soyo SY-K7V Dragon+ with an AMD XP 1800, 256mb Crucial memory, Visiontek MMX Video Card (don't remember which version), a 20gb Western Digital HD, and a SoundBlaster Live sound card. There is also a floppy drive and a Creative 52x CD-Rom and I have disabled the onboard audio. The problem is that with Win XP Pro SP1 loaded the machine keeps locking up (no blue screen just totally freezes and have to power off) when PC Anywhere is attempted to be installed or when playing a Shockwave game off a web site (from what the person who I built it for tells me).
When I first looked at the machine I noticed in the Event Viewer that there were errors reading and writing to the hard drive. I figure is either a bad drive or maybe the controller is bad. The easiest thing to replace since I had the same type of drive laying around was the hard drive. So I attempted to Ghost an image of the current drive but no matter what I did it failed. So I put in the new drive and rebuilt the machine with Win XP Pro SP1. Had no more lockups after doing some testing and returned it. The user reported a week later that the machine locked when trying install PC Anywhere and there are no errors in the Event Viewer. I read on Symantec's web site that XP may not restart properly upon installation and that you have to uninstall and try again (great solution). But since it never installs, I don't think it applies here plus the machine still locks when playing a Shockwave game off some web site.
My dilemna is what is causing these problems? I was thinking memory but my experience has been memory problems usually lead to a blue screen not lockups. I am also thinking it could be something with the motherboard and I could see there being a problem with the video card, too. Any suggestions as I would like to lick this without having to swap everything out but knowing how things go, it'll be the last thing I try. I have also seen the SoundBlaster causing problems and when I remove the card and use onboard audio things seem to work fine. I guess the easiest thing to do is try removing the sound card since I would not need any replacement parts.
Thanks for your thoughts.
When I first looked at the machine I noticed in the Event Viewer that there were errors reading and writing to the hard drive. I figure is either a bad drive or maybe the controller is bad. The easiest thing to replace since I had the same type of drive laying around was the hard drive. So I attempted to Ghost an image of the current drive but no matter what I did it failed. So I put in the new drive and rebuilt the machine with Win XP Pro SP1. Had no more lockups after doing some testing and returned it. The user reported a week later that the machine locked when trying install PC Anywhere and there are no errors in the Event Viewer. I read on Symantec's web site that XP may not restart properly upon installation and that you have to uninstall and try again (great solution). But since it never installs, I don't think it applies here plus the machine still locks when playing a Shockwave game off some web site.
My dilemna is what is causing these problems? I was thinking memory but my experience has been memory problems usually lead to a blue screen not lockups. I am also thinking it could be something with the motherboard and I could see there being a problem with the video card, too. Any suggestions as I would like to lick this without having to swap everything out but knowing how things go, it'll be the last thing I try. I have also seen the SoundBlaster causing problems and when I remove the card and use onboard audio things seem to work fine. I guess the easiest thing to do is try removing the sound card since I would not need any replacement parts.
Thanks for your thoughts.
