[SpyderS05]

Motherboard? CPU? Ram? I think something's wrong!

I just built a new computer for my dad and its all messed up. I put everything together fine, I've built a several computers so I know what i'm doing for the most part. Any way, I plugged it in and started it up and it seemed to be working fine, I went into the BIOS and loaded the Fail-Safe Defaults and then restarted...I put the Windows XP Pro disc in and let it boot from CD. But it keeps freezing up in different places, sometimes into doens't even boot from the CD...other times it freezes at the Windows is Inspecting your Hardware Configuration... or the blue screen actually comes up and it starts to load some of the files for XP and then freezes there. I've tried just about everything and I can't seem to get it to load. I even put the XP disc in his old computer to see if maybe the CD was bad and it ran fine on that. I tried loading Optimized Defaults as well and that didn't help...also when I first started it up I forgot to plug in the CPU fan so it ran for maybe 2 minutes total without a fan. And that's 2 minutes total, not all at once. I don't know if it could have gotten hot enough in that time to damage it...any help would be appreciated.

Motherboard - DFI PT880 ALF
Processor - Intel Pentium 4 2.80E GHz
Ram - Ultra 512MB PC3200 DDR 400MHz
HD - 80 GB Western Digital
Video Card - Jetway Radeon 9000 64MB 8X

 

[PurpleSky]

Do you have your hd and cd rom on different channels ? Did you use thermal compound ?

 

[SpyderS05]

What do you mean on different channels??? Yes I had a thermal compound.

 

[PurpleSky]

are they on different cables ? how many sticks of ram do you have ? can you try one stick at a time ?

 

[SpyderS05]

Ya, there both on different IDE cables, just one 512 MB stick.

 

[PurpleSky]

download and burn this on a cd please. then run the memtest first. http://public.ubcd.planetmirror.com/download.html

how to : download the .iso file. burn it on a cd as an image ( nero is great doing it )

 

[SpyderS05]

Well, this computer doesn't have a burner so I'm just gonna put it on my jump drive and I'll have to burn it to a CD later...I'll probably post back about how it went tommorow or later tonight. Any other suggestions?

Also...should I get the full or basic version?

 

[PurpleSky]

I would swap parts. PowerSupply, ram, videocard, cpu. If you have extra parts you can swap one at a time and see if it works.

 

[SpyderS05]

I got it burnt to a CD and when I go to run it it does the same thing as the XP disc...it got to the first screen and then I went to Mainboard Tools and then there was a list of tests...I tried to run the Memory test but it was froze there.

 

[SpyderS05]

Problem Solved! Ya, turns out I'm just a idiot and the heatsink wasn't completly on...lol, thanks for the help anyway.