Freaky behaviour on XP system- Help needed.

[FayeC]

A friend's computer out of a sudden started cycling during startup..it would
get to the screen telling them to choose which installation (weird since it
only had one anyways)...if you chose the top one it would go back to the
bios screen, if you chose the bottom it would go to a screen telling us it
is restarting the install...
He told me to go ahead and format so I used a win98 boot disk and tried to
format c...well...I got an error saying that C didn't have a recognizeable
FAT partition (which is fine if you had a NTSF but I have always formated my
own XP computer this way and it's using NTSF and I never got this error
before)...it wouldn't format C at all...
I then changed the boot order and booted from the Windows XP cd and
reinstalled windows. In the process I selected for a full NTSF format of the
partition.
Well...he has a ASUS P4S533-E, P4 1.6 with 512 RAM (just got 256 more 2
months ago) and after I finished installing windows, Word, Powerpoint and
Norton the computer was crawling to a halt....very slow...then it started
rebooting out of nowhere....
I managed to update the virus definitions but the computer crashed every
time I tried to open Norton to tell it to run a full scan...
My questions are:
1- Could this be a virus in his boot sector and if so how do I eliminate it?
2- The computer had a minor upgrade 2 months ago...the computer store added
256 DDR400 RAM to his computer...that made me curious since chances are his
old RAM was not a DDR400 stick as the computer was 3 years old...Could this
be a hardware conflict? I didn't see anything else wrong in the hardware
manager though.

Any help is very appreciated,


FayeC

 

[R. McCarty]

That motherboard would only support 333Mhz or PC2700 DDR RAM.
You can get away with faster RAM using a slower FSB, but not the other
way around.

Issues could be memory stick miss-matching, best to use a Hardware
inventory tool that can interrogate the memory for it's timing values. If
they are significantly different, I would try running the box with only a
single stick or RAM or get a single stick of say 512 RAM to avoid the
timing variances.

 

[Rich Barry]

Faye, try removing the newer Ram. He might have DDR-333 and the new
DDR-400 might be a problem. Did you reinstall
all the newest drivers for his System?
http://www.asus.com.tw/support/download/item.aspx?ModelName=P4S533-E