New here, need some help

I've been reading these boards for several days not getting opinions on who knows what and what is good hardware for upgrading. Crashman and HardwareBoss have impressed me with their patience and knowledge. Ok so here's my dilema, kind of long winded! All items below were purchased on recommendations from this board.


Well I built a new PC yesterday/today. Abit IC7-G, P4 2.6Cghz, 512mb DDR3200
RAM, S-ATA 120GB 7200rpm Maxtor drive, Asus GeForce V9520 128mb vid card,
Win2K. Well things aren't going well at all. I've spent nearly 24hrs working
on this thing, it runs but there's issues. I've never had as many "system
event" errors as I'm having now.

At first I made the hard drive NTFS, what a nightmare. So today I was able
to get it to FAT32 and doing a fdisk/mbr because of possible corruption (I
was getting a lot of svchost errors). So I get the HD working, get Win2K
installed, actually get all of the Windows Updates loaded (that took some
time), installed McAfee virus scan (always used it) and pretty much just
installed drivers for the vid card, audio and LAN card, nothing else.

I'm getting weird hangups, sometimes on boot the screen is blank until I
access taskmanager. Once in a while McAfee Security Center disappears. Or I
get booted offline and need to reboot. Yes I'm getting system event errors,
there lies the problems and trying to figure out what the solution is.
Here's a list of them, think you can help? One other weird problem, both
PC's when starting to boot come up to a screen that asks which operating
system I wish to boot off of, how can I eliminate that? Thanks....Dave

System Errors: Also I've checked for viruses, found one and cleaned it
w32/gaobot.worm.gen.b, obvious there's a pattern here and everything flows
downhill.
---------------------------------
Event Type: Error
Event Source: Service Control Manager
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7000
Date: 12/29/2003
Time: 11:38:18 AM
User: N/A
Computer: HOME
Description:
The System Loader service failed to start due to the following error:
The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely
fashion.
--------------------------------------------
Event Type: Error
Event Source: Service Control Manager
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7009
Date: 12/29/2003
Time: 11:39:20 AM
User: N/A
Computer: HOME
Description:
Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for the System Loader service to
connect.
-------------------------------------------
Event Type: Error
Event Source: Service Control Manager
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7000
Date: 12/29/2003
Time: 11:39:20 AM
User: N/A
Computer: HOME
Description:
The System Loader service failed to start due to the following error:
The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely
fashion.
-------------------------------------------
Event Type: Error
Event Source: Service Control Manager
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7031
Date: 12/29/2003
Time: 11:39:20 AM
User: N/A
Computer: HOME
Description:
The McAfee.com VirusScan Online Realtime Engine service terminated
unexpectedly. It has done this 1 time(s). The following corrective action
will be taken in 0 milliseconds: No action.
----------------------------------------
Event Type: Error
Event Source: Service Control Manager
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7031
Date: 12/29/2003
Time: 11:39:20 AM
User: N/A
Computer: HOME
Description:
The McAfee.com McShield service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 1
time(s). The following corrective action will be taken in 0 milliseconds:
No action.
---------------------------------------
Event Type: Error
Event Source: Service Control Manager
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7031
Date: 12/29/2003
Time: 11:39:20 AM
User: N/A
Computer: HOME
Description:
The ASUS Driver Helper Service service terminated unexpectedly. It has done
this 1 time(s). The following corrective action will be taken in 0
milliseconds: No action.
---------------------------------

The problems were occuring before McAfee was installed. Yesterday I couldn't even get it installed. I'll check my RAM voltage and reply with the values.

DDR SDRAM voltage 2.6V
AGP voltage 1.55V
CPU - default 1.5250V

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by firehouse16 on 12/29/03 08:15 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

I'm not a hardware guy but as far as my knowledge is concerned (I do web development for a living) Win2K is a professional OS and will ONLY run on NTFS so unless you created a seperate partition and installed the root directory on the partition in NTFS I don't know how you are running FAT.

Seems to me by some of your comments that you didn't properly format your Hard Drive.

Perhaps you should start fresh. boot from your Win2k disk, make sure all partitions are deleted and format the entire drive WITH NTFS and make a clean install.

Again, this is from personal experience not professional experience. That has always been my method of installation and I have never had problems.

What about your power supply unit?

-Always put the blame on you first, then on the hardware !!!

Cool, can you maybe post what a normal boot.ini looks like, here's mine now:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect
C:\ = "Unidentified operating system on drive C."

Using FAT32 will work but there are limitations. Here are a few links that describe usage of the FAT32 system with its Pros and Cons:

http://support.microsoft.com/defau [...] -US;100108

http://support.microsoft.com/defau [...] ct=win2000

I have always used NTFS (As increased file security is an issue for me) but have not used Win2k since XP Professional was released. Again my expertiese is in Data Enabled Web Development (SQL, ASP, HTML ... etc) so others may know more about this than I do.

I'm not the biggest fan of XP but have managed to tweak it to my liking by following many services guides on the web (you'd be surprised how many services are automatically running that aren't needed).