Help Please

[Katchin]

hi, got a PC thats driving me mad.

Athlon XP2200
512mb PC2700 (although PC3200 in there atm as test)
CDRW
DVD
Floppy
Soundblaster Live Value
Gainwwod Geforce4 Ti4200 128mb
40Gb HDD
10/100 Network card
EP-8K7A EPOX mainboard (I think)
Window XP Pro, SP1
Direct x 9.0c
newest video and sound drivers

The symptoms are:-

1, Playing fine in a game, suddenly the display shuts down, and the monitor
goes into powersave after a few secs (it does this when getting no signal),
after a minute or two the whole PC reboots. Sometimes it works OK again for
quite some time, but more usual is that it goes into a cycle of losing
display and rebooting.
2, sometimes when it reboots it gives 'windows has recently recovered from a
serious error' message, this message makes references to NV4, but this whole
losing display and rebooting thing happened when I tried a different video
card as well.
3, Noisy CPU Fan No temp change visable though.

What I've tried so far:-

1, switching slots memory was in. seemed to help a lot, I had no crashes for
24hours, suddenly it all started again.
2, Using different memory, also seemed to help for a while, but it all
started again the next day.
3, Used a different older graphics card. no visable change.
4, Formated. No change.
5, Unplugged peripherals, currently, floppy, both cd drives, and sound are
unplugged.
6, tried different drivers, sound and video. no change.

Whats wrong?
At the moment, i'm thinking powersupply, memory, or mainboard, maybe
processor.
I dont have the cash to replace all these bits at once, so any help pointing
to one or two devices to replace would be gratefully received.

 

[Clark]

Did you check and make sure nothing was blocking your CPU fan? Sometime a
wire will get close enough to catch it.

Have you tried leaving the case off or open? Maybe even use an external
fan.

When you changed Video cards, did you stay with the basic windows VGA driver
and in 640x480 mode?

Does it do this if you boot into safe mode?

Do you show anything in the events viewer? (Control panel-admin tools-event
viewer)

Clark

 

[jim]

hi, got a PC thats driving me mad.

Athlon XP2200
512mb PC2700 (although PC3200 in there atm as test)
CDRW
DVD
Floppy
Soundblaster Live Value
Gainwwod Geforce4 Ti4200 128mb
40Gb HDD
10/100 Network card
EP-8K7A EPOX mainboard (I think)
Window XP Pro, SP1
Direct x 9.0c
newest video and sound drivers

The symptoms are:-

1, Playing fine in a game, suddenly the display shuts down, and the
monitor goes into powersave after a few secs (it does this when
getting no signal), after a minute or two the whole PC reboots.
Sometimes it works OK again for quite some time, but more usual is
that it goes into a cycle of losing display and rebooting.
2, sometimes when it reboots it gives 'windows has recently recovered
from a serious error' message, this message makes references to NV4,
but this whole losing display and rebooting thing happened when I
tried a different video card as well.
3, Noisy CPU Fan No temp change visable though.

What I've tried so far:-

1, switching slots memory was in. seemed to help a lot, I had no
crashes for 24hours, suddenly it all started again.
2, Using different memory, also seemed to help for a while, but it all
started again the next day.
3, Used a different older graphics card. no visable change.
4, Formated. No change.
5, Unplugged peripherals, currently, floppy, both cd drives, and
sound are unplugged.
6, tried different drivers, sound and video. no change.

Whats wrong?
At the moment, i'm thinking powersupply, memory, or mainboard, maybe
processor.
I dont have the cash to replace all these bits at once, so any help
pointing to one or two devices to replace would be gratefully
received.

Hi, I have few sugestions

It doesn't sound to stable, try running prime95 to test for processor and
memory stability. If thats ok I would think it would be something to do with
the graphics board and or motherboard. Try turning off fast writes in your
BIOS that seems to help some people.

 

[Frank]

Memtest will test if it's a memory problem. No errors after a few hours
generally should exclude your ram from the problem.
http://www.memtest86.com/#download0

 

[Shep©]

hi, got a PC thats driving me mad.

Athlon XP2200
512mb PC2700 (although PC3200 in there atm as test)
CDRW
DVD
Floppy
Soundblaster Live Value
Gainwwod Geforce4 Ti4200 128mb
40Gb HDD
10/100 Network card
EP-8K7A EPOX mainboard (I think)
Window XP Pro, SP1
Direct x 9.0c
newest video and sound drivers

The symptoms are:-

1, Playing fine in a game, suddenly the display shuts down, and the monitor
goes into powersave after a few secs (it does this when getting no signal),
after a minute or two the whole PC reboots. Sometimes it works OK again for
quite some time, but more usual is that it goes into a cycle of losing
display and rebooting.
2, sometimes when it reboots it gives 'windows has recently recovered from a
serious error' message, this message makes references to NV4, but this whole
losing display and rebooting thing happened when I tried a different video
card as well.
3, Noisy CPU Fan No temp change visable though.

What I've tried so far:-

1, switching slots memory was in. seemed to help a lot, I had no crashes for
24hours, suddenly it all started again.
2, Using different memory, also seemed to help for a while, but it all
started again the next day.
3, Used a different older graphics card. no visable change.
4, Formated. No change.
5, Unplugged peripherals, currently, floppy, both cd drives, and sound are
unplugged.
6, tried different drivers, sound and video. no change.

Whats wrong?
At the moment, i'm thinking powersupply, memory, or mainboard, maybe
processor.
I dont have the cash to replace all these bits at once, so any help pointing
to one or two devices to replace would be gratefully received.

My Computer/Right Click/Properties/Advanced/Startup And Recovery and
disable,"Automatically Restart".
HTH