ECS K7VZA Problems Left and Right

G

Guest

Guest
Stats:
ECS K7VZA Motherboard
AMD T-Bird 1.33Ghz 266fsb
SoundBlaster Live Platinum 5.1 w/IR Live!Drive
IBM Deskstar 60 Gig HD
Toshiba 16x DVD
Lite-On 12x-10x-32x CD-RW
3dfx Voodoo3 (outdated I know, but I ran out of money)
3Com NIC Card
Diamond SupraMax! 56k/V90 Modem
OS Windows 2000

Grrrrr is about all I can say as a reaction to my satisfaction with the K7VZA. I had to wait a month to use the motherboard because my processor (AMD T-Bird 1.33Ghz) was backordered, so I put all of the components of my new computer into the shell of my old HP running off of it's 533Mhz Celeron, and, suprisingly, everything worked perfectly. I installed Windows 2000 on the hard-drive and installed and set-up all of my new hardware and had everything working perfecly together, and I was honestly getting excited to see what this combination of parts could do once I got my new motherboard and processor. I was horrificly disapointed, as everything worked, but not for very long. At this point I can maintain an uptime of about 10 minutes (and that's pushing it) before my system will freeze, no explanation why, it'll just freeze. In the beginning I thought it was a hardware conflict between the SoundBlaster and the onboard sound of the motherboard, as as soon as I installed my SoundBlaster the system froze and would do so soon after booting. I sought help from both ECS and Creative, and I tried both of their suggestions (disabling the onboard sound, updating onboard sound, re-formatting (again) and trying again, etc...) but none worked. At this point I have the SoundBlaster back in it's box, and the system will still freeze, no explanation, I will just be sitting there and it'll freeze, I'll be emailing, it'll freeze, I'll be playing music through the onboard sound and it'll freeze, and it's on average about 10 minutes into windows. I formatted my hard-drive and reinstalled windows, both with onboard sound disabled and the SounBlaster in, and with the SoundBlaster out and onboard sound enabled, and my system will still freeze. I've tried to see if I can get any better performance off of another OS (98se, ME) and I still get the same results. At this point in the game I'm at a loss, I have no idea of where to go now, as it is I'm shopping for a new motherboard, as everything worked fine together in my Celeron, so I'm making an educated guess that something's wrong with the K7VZA and it's conflicing with my other hardware. My computer sits useless and acting as nothing more than an expensive paperweight at this point. I'm more than willing to entertain/follow any suggestions, no matter how outrageous, I just want a solution that doesn't involve me spending 150$ and buying a second motherboard.
Jesse
 

jlanka

Splendid
Mar 16, 2001
4,064
0
22,780
Have you tried stripping down to bare minimum (e.g. removing the modem as well) to see how it does?

Also, you didn't mention what type of RAM you're running. Have you tried some different RAM (if you can get another stick somewhere?)

Just the usual starting point.

<i>It's always the one thing you never suspected.</i>