Be Excellent To Each Other

JeanTech is part of the Trust empire. As cheapass PSUs go they're one of the best but yes, they're a budget brand.

NorthQ, Corsair, Antec are all superb names.

There is no WTF big enough for this.

This morning I have had the following happen:

Firstly, case fan sounds like it's on its way out. Remove and clean, but it's still noisy - bin
Without the case fan, I got the following:

Nothing at all - monitor won't even come on
Gets as far as the boot menu (I'm dual-booting with ubuntu, but I don't really use it), then it locks up when I press enter, but windows continues to load in the back ground, there's loads of hd activity which then stops after a bit, all the while the screen is still frozen on the boot menu
Getting as far as the desktop, but locking up before everything has loaded
Locking up at the "Loading Personal Settings" screen

So, apart from sending me to pc world to buy a new case fan and adding my gfx card to the potential list of suspects, does this tell me anything useful?

is there a local independant comp shop near you, that you can take it too.?

Hmm, there used to be a dodgy one up the road, but I don't think it's there anymore.
Perhaps I need to take advantage of some distance selling regulations to see if I can work out what's wrong.

At the moment I'm shopping for:
Motherboard
CPU
Ram
GFX card
PSU
Case Fan

I could probably buy a new pc for less. There goes my new monitor budget (and more).

I did mean to pay more attention to this last night but I forgot (or got drunk, one of the two).

After a morning of total failure, I've just moved the PC plug onto a different socket (still shared with a million other plugs) and my pc has booted successfuly for the first time today.

Fingers crossed that this has actually fixed it (I can't help but feel I've been here before), so thanks Bobby (and everyone else) for your help. (I'm still tempted to do some upgrading, but I'll save that for another thread).

Looks like after all this I'm going to B&Q to get a new 4-way adaptor.

Edit - Or maybe not. It locked up before I actually did anything.

From what I have read, I wouldn't get your hopes up that the plug solves it, but good luck.

The plot thickens (yes, even further)

After it had locked up, I tried pinging it, but got host unreachable.
I rebooted, but kept pinging, and at some point during booting my monitor lost signal, but there was still plenty of hd activity and eventually my pings started to get a response.
I have now swapped my Geforce 7600GT for some piece of crap PCI card from the mid-90's and have successfully got through 10 minutes of Memtest.

Update - I am now running xp in 640x480 4 bit colour - it's like an exciting glimpse into the future.

So... Assuming this keeps working (which is definitely not a safe assumption), I guess I need to pin the blame on a) my gfx card, b) my PSU not having enough power to power my gfx card, but enough to power this 512k abomination or c) the wireless network card I took out to make room for the gfx card.

I guess if I put my old gfx card in and lose a couple of drives (like everyone told me too) then I can see if it's a power of a gfx card issue.
I'm still incredibly confused though.

Could be a broken track on the motherboard. It would usually be in contact, but slight vibrations to the case or fluctuating temperatures could cause the connection to be broken for long enough to crash the PC.

Regarding hardware recommendations, I always had the most success with Gigabyte boards, Intel processors and Crucial RAM when I built my own PCs. Don't skimp on the motherboard.

EDIT: Oh my, there's a second page that I didn't see. I'm behind the times.

It's probably not the wireless card. I've had problems with wireless card before (to the point where I had to download the chipset manufacturer's drivers and edit the .inf to include a new PCI ID simply to stop it bluescreening every two minutes.

Thanks, D-Link.

See, this is why we say PSUs are so important. It's much easier to target problems when you know you can rely on your PSU to not be at fault.

REMEMBER KIDS, WINNERS DONT USE CHEAP PSUS.

PSUS.

YES.

POWER SUPPLIES.

THEY ARE GOOD, NO?



psus.

More Updates!

I upgraded my cirrus logic whatever it was back to my GeForce 7600 GT, but at the same time unplugged every hard drive (apart from my system one), my optical drives and all my pci cards.

Basically, I was running

A8N-E mobo
Athlon X2 4200+
Geforce 7600GT PCI-E
4x512meg ram
1 300gig IDE HD
It booted to windows and then locked up.

Any good reason why I shouldn't go and buy a new gfx card (and order a new psu)?

Edit - I was joking about the wireless NIC, but I just thought I should let you know.

I'd suggest that rather than being an issue with the GFX card, it's likely that the GFX card power draw is making the PSU flake out. So upgrade the PSU, keep the same GFX card, and see what happens.

You make a good point. I'll order a new PSU and see if I can run it off the old card until it turns up. If it is because the GFX card is drawing too much power (although I've had it for over 2 years), there's no point buying an even more powerful one.

PSUs do wear out over time. 2 years on the edge of it's capacity would be a good showing for a budget model.

It's the gfx card that's 2 years old. Of the two PSU's I'm running one is probably 3-4 years old, the other one about 6 months. This does imply that they've both suddenly decided that they can't supply enough power at exactly the same time.

Still, I'm back posting from my desktop pc, although the 16 bit colour may make me go blind.

As you'd be much better off with a better PSU anyway, I'd say upgrading it and seeing how it runs is your best course of action. If you need to upgrade your graphics card later on you'd need a nicer PSU to power it anyway.

I hope it goes okay, I know just how frustrating pinpointing a problem that doesn't always occur can be!

Well, this is the best I've had it running all day, so I can't complain. The forums are a funny shade of green though and your avatar looks terrible.
I'm not a massive pc gamer, so I think I can cope for a couple of days. Although if I find this gfx card still doesn't work with a new PSU, I don't need to spend too much on a new one as it's clearly overpowered for what I use it for.

Anyway, thanks (again) for your help (everyone). I realise it's probably been a pain me regularly bumping this to say that my pc has locked up again for no apparent reason and it will have been just as tricky for you guys to pinpoint as it was for me.

Anyway, I'm off to order a PSU.

Edit - Does this get the BETEO seal of approval?

Nothing wrong with that at all. Looks nice.

Acceptable certainly.

I guess that'll have to do. Ordered.

Expect me to revive the thread next week when things still don't work properly.

*fingers crossed*

My PSU has arrived and has been installed. I have put my GeForce card back in. So far everything seems ok. Also, this PSU is really, really quiet.
I hope this hasn't been too premature, but thanks again everyone.

Don't mind the smoke coming out of the back. That's completely normal.

That's what I thought.

FTFY

I don't have a switch anymore.

DON'T TELL ME YOU SWITCHED IT ON WITHOUT CHECKING THE JUMPER INSIDE

Oh Shi... BRB.

Hi, sorry, me again.

So, I ran it for a couple of hours last night (I went out not long after my last post), and from about 8-6 today before giving it an hour off. I've just got back and turned it on and it locked up twice before it finished booting to the desktop (the desktop had appeared, but it was still loading all the extra crap). Third time is currently working, but it appears I still have something faulty. Bearing in mind I managed to run all day sunday and monday and most of tuesday with my (very) old gfx card, should a replacement be next on my shopping list? (followed by a replacement mobo, because actually it's the PCI-E slot that's broken or something).

I assume you've tried it in a different slot, if you have one?

Also check it's not dumping its heat onto the northbridge or anything stupid.

Buy a new pooter. If you throw enough money at it the problem will go away.

Unfortunately I only have one PCI-E slot (or one 16x or whatever it is and two others, only one it will fit in anyway).

According to my temperature reading thingies (which I am taking with a pinch of salt) my pc is quite cool and when I've taken it apart just after running nothing is particularly hot to the touch.

Also, if it was a temperature thing, I wouldn't expect it to run a whole day without issue, then suddenly decide it's running too hot after cold booting it.

Myp, you're right, but I'd like to try and throw my money in the right place.

Before you go much further, check the Event Viewer and see if there are any clues about what the PC was doing at the time of the crash. It may be possible to work out what part is failing from what it was doing at the time.

Also turn off Cool and Quiet if it's not already, just to rule out a dodgy speed step.

There are a couple of errors/warnings in the event log, but they're exactly the same as during my failed bootup last night, and my successful one this morning.
I don't think I installed cool & quiet when I flattened and reinstalled about 6 months ago, although I've probably installed the processor drivers that seem to do exactly the same thing.

I agree.

*sigh*

Fine yesterday. Took a few goes to get running this morning.
I'm going to be out all day today, but if I get the chance I might pick up a new gfx card, then see if I need to throw more money at it from there.

You know, at this point I think I'd just survive with it as is, and save to build an actual new PC.

I can cope with it just deciding it doesn't want to boot every couple of days, but if it goes back to random lockups when I'm trying to work, or just not booting at all like last saturday, then I kind of need to do something about it.

Perhaps inevitably, when I got home this afternoon, I couldn't get it to boot at all.
So I put a new graphics card in and... it still didn't work.

I may just have to get used to 1024x768.

So, shall I now start to assume that my PCI-E slot is fucked and I need to get a new motherboard?

Can you get hold of a PCI graphics card to test?

It's starting to look like a motherboard problem though. Suggest you try a factory reset of the BIOS just to make sure it's not overclocked slightly or anything.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. I'm using a PCI graphics card now. An ancient cirrus logic thing.
I used it last week from saturday evening to tuesday evening without a problem.

I think my memory timings are tweaked a bit because I couldn't get it to run on auto (some sort of AMD memory protection thing that thinks my memory is shit, which it probably is). I'll give that a go though, ta.

Make sure if you're using 4 sticks you're running 2T. The Nforce 4 has major problems with 1T. My Nforce 4 knocks my 400mhz 1T sticks to 2T 333Mhz with all four slots filled.

It was set to 2T 333Mhz.
I've reset to defaults, which unfortunately doesn't really seem to indicate what the ram timings are as it just sets it to auto and greys them out.
A look at cpu-z seems to suggest it hasn't changed my ram timings at all.
I'm still running on the PCI card at the moment, so this isn't going to prove anything yet.

Exciting Update:

Doesn't want to know with the PCI-E card installed (either of them).
Locks up before it finishes booting into windows, or after a couple of minutes in the bios
Swap it for the PCI card and everything's fine (apart from the fact that I've travelled back in time ).

Guess it's a time for a new mobo then.
Unfortunately, socket 939 appears to be the black sheep of the nForce family, so a like for like swap might not be possible and if I buy anything else, I'll need a new cpu and probably new ram.

I was going to suggest my MB, but when I searched for it, I couldn't find one! Didn't realise I was so out of date!

how about this one:
http://www.pcupgrade.co.uk/productdetails.asp?ProductID=2291&categoryid=271

or a refurbed one
ebay

You think you're out of date, I'm trying to find a motherboard with more than 1 IDE channel.

It's supposed to be good practice to reinstall windows when you get a new motherboard, but could I get away with it if I got a different model with the same chipset? Although to be honest, with the prices of 939 boards on that pcupgrade website, I may as well buy a new one (although yes, I'd need a new cpu and ram as well).

I'll keep having a shop around and see how tempted I am by shiny new stuff.

No. Rebuild the machine. It's the only way. Otherwise you'll have horrible leftover installs of drivers for wierd on-chipset sound cards and shit.

Ok then people, It's been about 2 & a half years since I bought some new bits.
I'm happy to spend a couple of hundred quid, but I don't really need anything overly powerful (which I probably won't get for £2-300).
Any recommendations (loosely translated as "do my shopping for me" ).

* Oh, and you do want my MB then. I have an ABit KN8 Ultra, 2 IDe, 4 Sata, and PCIe gfx card slot. I couldn't find one on a quick search, but I would imagine if you could it would be dirt cheap by now.

**Even if you got socket 939 MB? If that is the case, why are you limiting yourself to 939?

Sorry, I meant that for the price of a replacement 939 board, I could buy myself a nice new Intel something-or-other (that may not be any good because I haven't done any research), but if I did, I'd need a new cpu and ram.
I currently have an ASUS A8N-E, and assuming that's the duff bit, I've got the cpu and ram to go in a replacement.
Of course the way things are going, I could get a replacement A8N-E and that still wouldn't fix things, but I think at that point I'd probably just throw it out the window and use my laptop.

Yeah, I probably would be better off spending not much money on a replacement 939 board, rather than upgrading to something I'm not going to make the most of. I'll see what I can find. Thanks.

I personally run an Abit AN8 Ultra, as it's completely passively cooled, no Northbridge fan to whine like a little banshee.

I've also used Epox 9NPA+ Ultra for my girlfriend's build. It's been rock solid.

If you replace it with the exact same model you have you can get away without a reinstall.

Yeah, I know that, I just wasn't sure if I could replace it with another nForce board and get away with it.
If I can't find an identical replacement, then I may as well give myself a bit of an upgrade.
It's been about 2 and a half years, which seems to be the kind of cycle I run on.

Edit - Hello Intel people Socket 775 seems to be quite popular, should I get a motherboard with that or will I come to regret it?

Edit again - oh wow, memory is a lot cheaper than it used to be.
If I buy a cpu with a 1333Mhz FSB, does that mean I should be looking to buy PC5300 (667Mhz) ram (to run in dual channel)?