G
gej
Ok... Since I FINALLY made the move to a DDR based PC back in January,
I've been plagued with nothing but problems. First, the obligatory PC
specs
AMD Athlon XP2000+
MSI K7 Master-S Motherboard
2GB RAM (1GB Kingston, 1GB PNY, both PC2700 DDR)
160GB Maxtor HD
40GB WD HD
2x18GB Fujitsu U160 SCSI HD
M-Audio Audiophile 192 (previously a Digidesign Audiomedia III)
Diamond Viper 770 TNT2 (though past cards have been Matrox G450 DH and
generic GeForce2MX)
NetGear GA311 10/100/1000 NIC
Now... Originally, I had built this with my old AMD Tbird 1.3Ghz/100
processor in mind, but a call to my local PC recycler netted an Athlon
XP 2000+ for $5, couldn't pass that up. From jump, I had stability
issues, but I figured it had more to do with my being lazy and simply
transferring my old hd (60GB, not listed) from the old SDRAM based
machine (Iwill KV200-R board, 768MB RAM, all the same cards, plus
Adaptec 2940UW) and dropping into the new machine. From that point, I
got random blue screens, usually with 0x8E errors. I then came across
a deal for an ABit KD7A board and dropped that in there but the
machine all but refused to boot to windows. Figuring the issues was
with the install, I took another HD and tried to do a fresh install of
XP. The XP installer crashed repeatedly with the same errors. A quick
google search revealed that this is usually due to bad ram. I swapped
the Kingston ram out 4 times before sending the KD7A back for an
exchange. While waiting for the exchange, I reinstalled the MSI board,
and installed XP, but it crashed 3 times before making it through the
install once. Once installed, XP ran ok with the odd crash. Figuring
that the RAM couldn't be bad (I was now on my 5th 1GB stick of RAM) I
turned my attention to the video card and swapped it several times,
each with varying degrees of success. The KD7A came back and I
installed it and, once again, attempted to install XP which yielded
the same instability and crashed every time once the installer got to
the "starting windows" message.
I rebuilt the machine using the MSI board and installed XP a final
time and have been running that configuration ever since. It crashes
at random and I've just accepted that, but keep the original Tbird/
KV200R machine close by. A few months ago, I enabled the SCSI
controller on the board (I had issues figuring out how to do it in the
BIOS) and got rid of the 2940. A reinstall of XP was in order and was
done, but it had to be done normally because my usual practice of
installing as "Standard PC" for performance gains yeilded a non-
working SCSI controller. Ever since then, the crashes have occured
more frequently.
Figuring that maybe it was a RAM issue, I bought another stick of RAM.
Still had the same crashes, so I took it back to the store. Just
yesterday, I installed yet another stick of ram but kept the Kingston
in place for a total of 2GB of RAM. Now the machine is horribly
unstable. Quake3 refuses to run for more than a few minutes (locking
up the machine completely), VSO X to DVD crashes the machine when
creating DVD's (the heart of my side business), and doing something as
simple as opening IE or Firefox could crash the machine. Last night, I
ran Memtest86+ and have left it running. As of this morning, it was at
3 passes with zero errors. I did one last search (using the old
faithful TBird machine!) and found that the L2 cache may be the reason
for this instability. I'm going to do a CPU swap when I get home,
dropping the Thunderbird in place of the Athlon XP, but I'd like to
know if it could just be that simple. Can all of my issues really be
traced back to a bad CPU?
I've been plagued with nothing but problems. First, the obligatory PC
specs
AMD Athlon XP2000+
MSI K7 Master-S Motherboard
2GB RAM (1GB Kingston, 1GB PNY, both PC2700 DDR)
160GB Maxtor HD
40GB WD HD
2x18GB Fujitsu U160 SCSI HD
M-Audio Audiophile 192 (previously a Digidesign Audiomedia III)
Diamond Viper 770 TNT2 (though past cards have been Matrox G450 DH and
generic GeForce2MX)
NetGear GA311 10/100/1000 NIC
Now... Originally, I had built this with my old AMD Tbird 1.3Ghz/100
processor in mind, but a call to my local PC recycler netted an Athlon
XP 2000+ for $5, couldn't pass that up. From jump, I had stability
issues, but I figured it had more to do with my being lazy and simply
transferring my old hd (60GB, not listed) from the old SDRAM based
machine (Iwill KV200-R board, 768MB RAM, all the same cards, plus
Adaptec 2940UW) and dropping into the new machine. From that point, I
got random blue screens, usually with 0x8E errors. I then came across
a deal for an ABit KD7A board and dropped that in there but the
machine all but refused to boot to windows. Figuring the issues was
with the install, I took another HD and tried to do a fresh install of
XP. The XP installer crashed repeatedly with the same errors. A quick
google search revealed that this is usually due to bad ram. I swapped
the Kingston ram out 4 times before sending the KD7A back for an
exchange. While waiting for the exchange, I reinstalled the MSI board,
and installed XP, but it crashed 3 times before making it through the
install once. Once installed, XP ran ok with the odd crash. Figuring
that the RAM couldn't be bad (I was now on my 5th 1GB stick of RAM) I
turned my attention to the video card and swapped it several times,
each with varying degrees of success. The KD7A came back and I
installed it and, once again, attempted to install XP which yielded
the same instability and crashed every time once the installer got to
the "starting windows" message.
I rebuilt the machine using the MSI board and installed XP a final
time and have been running that configuration ever since. It crashes
at random and I've just accepted that, but keep the original Tbird/
KV200R machine close by. A few months ago, I enabled the SCSI
controller on the board (I had issues figuring out how to do it in the
BIOS) and got rid of the 2940. A reinstall of XP was in order and was
done, but it had to be done normally because my usual practice of
installing as "Standard PC" for performance gains yeilded a non-
working SCSI controller. Ever since then, the crashes have occured
more frequently.
Figuring that maybe it was a RAM issue, I bought another stick of RAM.
Still had the same crashes, so I took it back to the store. Just
yesterday, I installed yet another stick of ram but kept the Kingston
in place for a total of 2GB of RAM. Now the machine is horribly
unstable. Quake3 refuses to run for more than a few minutes (locking
up the machine completely), VSO X to DVD crashes the machine when
creating DVD's (the heart of my side business), and doing something as
simple as opening IE or Firefox could crash the machine. Last night, I
ran Memtest86+ and have left it running. As of this morning, it was at
3 passes with zero errors. I did one last search (using the old
faithful TBird machine!) and found that the L2 cache may be the reason
for this instability. I'm going to do a CPU swap when I get home,
dropping the Thunderbird in place of the Athlon XP, but I'd like to
know if it could just be that simple. Can all of my issues really be
traced back to a bad CPU?