P4T533 hardware or software problem?

[Josh Walrath]

This is my system:

Asus P4T533 board
Pentium 4 2.8ghz
512mb Samsung 232pin RDRAM
Radeon 9700 Pro
120gb Western Digital hard drive
Sound Blaster Audigy

My problem is this. I install windows XP professional and everything goes
smoothly. As soon as I install my network card and sound card, any program
that accesses the internet crashes and says ''Microsoft Internet Explorer
has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the
inconvenience. If you were in the middle of something the information you
were working on might be lost. Please tell Microsoft about this problem.
We have created an error report that you can send to help us improve
Microsoft Internet Explorer. We will treat this report as confidential and
anonymous. To see what data this error report contains click here." If I
take the sound card and NIC back out or even restore it back to a previously
made system restore point the problem still occurs. The rest of the
computer works great, just IE and AIM and Outlook Express...they all crash
after about 5 seconds. I have formatted and reinstalled windows nearly 30
times. I am running out of options. I have made sure that the NIC and
soundcard work in another machine, and they work fine. The only other thing
I can think of is the memory, perhaps it is bad. Any suggestions would be a
huge help, thanks!

 

[Barry Watzman]

Try a different NIC; a totally different one, a different model not
using the same chip (since NIC cards these days are little more than a
single chip).

The fact that the board was "good" (if in fact it was) doesn't mean that
it was compatible with that motherboard. Also, some defects will cause
incompatibilities with some motherboards and/or chipsets and not others.

As far as the memory is concerned, that's a possibility, but somewhat
less likely. Get Memtest and run it for several hours (at least 10
passes or so). You should have ZERO errors, even one error is not
acceptable.

You could try a different soundcard as well.

Note, some early P4T533's had a problem, apparently in the Vcore power
supply to the CPU. Quite a few of these had to be returned for
repair/replacement. Be suspicious of this if your board does not have a
fan on the chipset, but rather only a heatsink.