Just TRY and solve this

[Guest]

Recently my computer has been freezing at random while running things such as IE, Winamp, AOL Instant Messenger. I can't do cntl+alt+del, etc, I've just got to restart altogether. Quite often while its booting back up it will randomly blue screen and pop up with white text saying something about memory dump, and then re-restart. (Usually happens once or twice).
I have Windows 2000
Tbird 1.2 (Was @1266 so I put it back to 1200 to try to stablize -- plus its at 1.8v)
Abit KT7A
256 MB RAM (Major Brand...nothing spectacular)
GF 2 Ultra
IBM ATA100 45GB HD
I'm not sure what else to list, I've got the newest VIA 1.29 drivers, Direct X 8, LargePageMinimum registry thing, and the ATA100 switch for Windows 2000 -- if you know what that is)

Thanks for your help.

 

[Guest]

I've had similar problems but with a different m/b. The problem was solved by a new bios. Don't know what version of the bios you have, but the latest one (KT7YH.EXE) may improve your situation. Just make sure you follow the instructions to the letter.

 

[Guest]

Actually I've had the newest BIOS for a couple weeks, which further confuses things.
Thanks for the reply.

 

[Guest]

Hi,

Did you by any chance install any software before the crashes started happening?

I installed BearShare awhile ago, and the 2 little spy programs that it quietly installs were making my system a little unstable, so I removed the whole bunch of them! hehe

Also, (this is a really long shot, but it could happen) check for viruses. I ran into one called Ripper once that caused gradual system instability by swapping 2 bytes in disk writes every once in a great while. A friend's office was totally infested by this thing. Like I said though, a long shot, but not totally difficult to check.

Hmm finally, there is apparently an issue with the BIOS of some boards with VIA chipsets and dual ATA 100 hard disks, but since you have only one, I guess that makes you safe

Just my guesses, things I would do before powering down and ripping out hardware!

 

[Guest]

Actually yeah I installed Ad-Aware 4.6 and deleted 'all the little bad programs'
Virus', I'll check into that.

Thanks.

 

[jlanka]

Couple of things:

Like another poster said, remove all but essentials and see if it is still unstable

If so, see if you can try a different RAM stick (or remove 128 of you've got 2 of those)

Lastly, only because I had problems with VIA 4 in 1 I would try the board without them. Yeah I know, you would probably get degraded performance, but if it solved the problem you could work from there. Lockups are worse than a marginally slower PC.

 

[327goat]

I had the same sort of problems, and it came down to the via 4in1's. I found that downloading each of the components of the 4in1's individualy, and installing them seperatly like that cleared the problem up.

 

[Guest]

Well, I don't really know how to download the 4 in 1's individually, but, I don't see what else could be causing it to freeze. So, I'll figure out how to do that, thanks.

 

[FUNCTOR]

I had a similar problem with my system.

I tracked it down to one of my 256Mb DIMMs. My system would boot up, but within 5 minutes, it would crash. I removed one of the DIMMs, and then it worked flawlessly. So, if you have 2 DIMMs, try one at a time, or if you only have one, it may be partially bad. If thats the case you'll need to test your system with a DIMM you know is good. Just my thoughts...

All things must surely have to end...
Functor

 

[Guest]

Does anyone know how to install the via 4in1 drivers seperately? Off via.com.tw you can only download the via4in11429.exe as one package. Also is there an easy way to uninstall the current 4in1 drivers?
thanks,
-tgo

 

[jlanka]

>Does anyone know how to install the via 4in1 drivers seperately?

Check this link:


<A HREF="http://www.viahardware.com/download/index.shtm#4in1" target="_new">http://www.viahardware.com/download/index.shtm#4in1</A>

Enjoy.