Hello all,
Apologies for the length of this post, but the situation is somewhat complicated :4-dontkno
A couple of weeks ago I bought a brand new computer from a local independent shop that sell & build PCs.
I chose the following system:
400W PSU
Asrock K8 Combo-Z 64-bit skt 754/939 Motherboard
Athlon 64 Skt 939 3000 Winchester (1.8 Ghz)
512 DDR400 RAM
120 GB IDE HDD (Maxtor)
I also have a DVD-RW, DVD-Rom, floppy drive, Radeon graphics card, etc.
When I went to pick it up, they said that because I chose a custom case, they had installed an MSI motherboard instead, specifically the K8T Neo2-FIR - Microstar.
So I brought it home and tried to install Win XP, but it wouldn't work. Windows Setup continually crashed in all sorts of places, including while copying driver.cab. We ran memtest-86 which found loads of errors and only found 256MB of RAM, so we thought it was simply a case of bad memory. We took the computer back to the shop and they replaced the RAM.
When we brought it home the 2nd time, with the new RAM, WinXP installed successfully. I then successfully installed my new printer/scanner/copier, Office XP, etc., and used the computer without any problems for 4 or 5 days.
Then, last Saturday the computer had its first really heavy day of use. It had been on for several hours, and I was in the middle of uploading some scanned pictures, when it suddenly stopped responding. It was working well enough that i could restart it from within Windows, but all the other programs stopped working properly.
When it restarted, nothing happened. The initial picture of the CoreCell chip flashed up, then ... nothing. A black screen. We tried pressing the Reset button over and over again, but it never worked, never even started loading XP. You could hear that the HDD wasn't doing anything.
So we left memtest running all night (it found some errors but not as many as the first time), Sunday we took it back to the shop. When the IT guy first switched it on, it booted up OK. But then he ran a program called TestMem, from the Ultimate Boot CD, which heated the RAM up, and when he then tried to switch the computer on, he got the same black-screen nothingness that we had had before. He had never seen that failure before.
He put in some different RAM (branded) but that didn't work either. So he thought it must be the motherboard, and replaced it with a new, identical MSI one. He also reformatted the hard drive.
But when we tried to install XP (in the shop) it kept crashing, or rather with 29 minutes remaining in Setup, it kept failing to detect the CD and saying "please insert the CD with Win XP" even though it was in the drive already. The IT bloke thought this was a related problem and kept retrying, it kept failing so eventually he changed the motherboard for an Asrock one (the one i had chosen originally!)
Problem is, when we got it home this evening, and reinstalled our own copy of XP, Setup had exactly the same error. So we tried it with the CD in the DVD-ROM drive, rather than the DVD-RW, and it worked! Which is good, but it means that it was probably a red herring - a bug in WinXP Setup, and nothing to do with the black-screen problem.
So after all that, my question is... Is it going to happen again? Can I trust this PC to write my thesis on, or not? Because we never found out why it did that black-screen thing in the first place, I don't know whether it's going to happen again. Was it a bad motherboard, or was it the interaction of the motherboard with the processor, or with the RAM, or something else altogether? :4-dontkno
The processor hasn't been changed, but it has a new motherboard (Asrock not MSI), and new RAM. I have run a couple of memory tests on it, e.g. the
free trial version of BurnInTest, and they found no errors, but the black-screen was so sudden and so catastrophic that I have no confidence in the machine and don't want to start writing on it again.
Thank you SO MUCH for trawling through all that, and any advice of any sort would be gratefully received.
Cheers
Jess
Apologies for the length of this post, but the situation is somewhat complicated :4-dontkno
A couple of weeks ago I bought a brand new computer from a local independent shop that sell & build PCs.
I chose the following system:
400W PSU
Asrock K8 Combo-Z 64-bit skt 754/939 Motherboard
Athlon 64 Skt 939 3000 Winchester (1.8 Ghz)
512 DDR400 RAM
120 GB IDE HDD (Maxtor)
I also have a DVD-RW, DVD-Rom, floppy drive, Radeon graphics card, etc.
When I went to pick it up, they said that because I chose a custom case, they had installed an MSI motherboard instead, specifically the K8T Neo2-FIR - Microstar.
So I brought it home and tried to install Win XP, but it wouldn't work. Windows Setup continually crashed in all sorts of places, including while copying driver.cab. We ran memtest-86 which found loads of errors and only found 256MB of RAM, so we thought it was simply a case of bad memory. We took the computer back to the shop and they replaced the RAM.
When we brought it home the 2nd time, with the new RAM, WinXP installed successfully. I then successfully installed my new printer/scanner/copier, Office XP, etc., and used the computer without any problems for 4 or 5 days.
Then, last Saturday the computer had its first really heavy day of use. It had been on for several hours, and I was in the middle of uploading some scanned pictures, when it suddenly stopped responding. It was working well enough that i could restart it from within Windows, but all the other programs stopped working properly.
When it restarted, nothing happened. The initial picture of the CoreCell chip flashed up, then ... nothing. A black screen. We tried pressing the Reset button over and over again, but it never worked, never even started loading XP. You could hear that the HDD wasn't doing anything.
So we left memtest running all night (it found some errors but not as many as the first time), Sunday we took it back to the shop. When the IT guy first switched it on, it booted up OK. But then he ran a program called TestMem, from the Ultimate Boot CD, which heated the RAM up, and when he then tried to switch the computer on, he got the same black-screen nothingness that we had had before. He had never seen that failure before.
He put in some different RAM (branded) but that didn't work either. So he thought it must be the motherboard, and replaced it with a new, identical MSI one. He also reformatted the hard drive.
But when we tried to install XP (in the shop) it kept crashing, or rather with 29 minutes remaining in Setup, it kept failing to detect the CD and saying "please insert the CD with Win XP" even though it was in the drive already. The IT bloke thought this was a related problem and kept retrying, it kept failing so eventually he changed the motherboard for an Asrock one (the one i had chosen originally!)
Problem is, when we got it home this evening, and reinstalled our own copy of XP, Setup had exactly the same error. So we tried it with the CD in the DVD-ROM drive, rather than the DVD-RW, and it worked! Which is good, but it means that it was probably a red herring - a bug in WinXP Setup, and nothing to do with the black-screen problem.
So after all that, my question is... Is it going to happen again? Can I trust this PC to write my thesis on, or not? Because we never found out why it did that black-screen thing in the first place, I don't know whether it's going to happen again. Was it a bad motherboard, or was it the interaction of the motherboard with the processor, or with the RAM, or something else altogether? :4-dontkno
The processor hasn't been changed, but it has a new motherboard (Asrock not MSI), and new RAM. I have run a couple of memory tests on it, e.g. the
free trial version of BurnInTest, and they found no errors, but the black-screen was so sudden and so catastrophic that I have no confidence in the machine and don't want to start writing on it again.
Thank you SO MUCH for trawling through all that, and any advice of any sort would be gratefully received.
Cheers
Jess