Ill computer, made well. Doctor nearly died.

[TheJANG]

Since I upgraded my 1ghz Athlon system to a 2.1ghz ("2800+") setup in late '03 or early '04, I've had trouble with DirectX (games would crash 10 to 20 minutes in). Fortunately this worked out fine, as I didn't need to be gaming anyhow. I recently got the itch to do a little gaming again, though, and decided to do something about it.

It turns out my CMOS was being corrupted for some unknown reason. CMOS resets led to stable running for a weekend, then it all went bad again, and this time the system didn't even want to POST (power-on self-test). I finally got it to run again by underclocking to 500mhz (no, I was not overclocked before).

Long story short, I decided to get a new motherboard. The installation was one of the most painful things I’ve done in quite awhile. After over an hour of pulling out my hair when the system wouldn’t even try to boot, I realized the manual was *wrong* about one of the jumper settings (CMOS reset). So I fixed that, then Windows XP gave a bluescreen error when trying to load. The error would go away so fast that I couldn’t see it, so I took video with my digicam, saved the video to my laptop, and did frame-by-frame to read the error. Thank goodness for the laptop and wireless setup. I did some Googling and found out about how XP doesn’t like motherboard upgrades. Get this: I had to do a COMPLETE reinstall of windows xp! That’s the complete 45-minute basic install, then 4 rounds of updates including the ~30-40 minute SP2 download & install, then drivers for the new board. ARGH!!!! I think I will buy my next computer prebuilt! :mad:

I sure hope it's stable now!

[sparko]

LoL, iv been there!
We have had to reinstall xp about 4/5 times now - its such a pain.
As for the gaming side, what were you playing as i have recently had many crashes 10/20 minutes in with battlefield 1942 and when you are piloting an apache at 3 feet over trees you dont want a system crash!

You might also want to consider putting all the updates on to disk, therefore if you do have to reinstall again, they will be there for you - This becomes handy the 3/4th time!

Good luck with stability!

[tron696]

Microsoft will mail SP2 on cd to you for free, no shipping fees.http://www.ultimaterc.com/forums/i/icons/icon7.gif
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/updates/sp2/cdorder/en_us/default.mspx

[WESTOZ racer]

By god, theres an eisier way then that people!!

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1755

That should help all of you, its easy as pie....mmmm piiee!

Dont forget the page you should bookmark for all your pc info/stats/forums/help/troubleshooting/anything else you can think of...
www.overclockers.com.au

And, if you want to make sure your computer is stable, best bet is to download "Prime95". If an error comes up when torture testing, youll know your pc has a hardware problem.

[sparko]

Thanks man, this could stop me from going bald by 17!

[Bulldozer]

What kind of mobo did u get JANG?

[ND4SPDR]

I refuse to install SP2. Still. :lol:

But I'm on Linux more often that not now anyways.

[.308AR]

I would say go with Linux but in this case you'd probably have to re-install for a new mobo anyway. At the very least you'd have to manually re-configure a lot of settings assuming you could even get a terminal screen to show up.

But then Windows can be even more finicky. I've had to do a fresh install after getting a new modem before. That was back in 95 days, though..