HELP! problems with new build

[BobbyD1120]

Hey everyone; I thank you in advance for your time and help. I have built a new computer for my parents with the following parts:
* AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Venice 2000MHz HT 512KB L2 Cache Socket 939 Processor - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819103535

* ASUS A8N-VM Socket 939 NVIDIA GeForce 6100 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131571

* (2) G.SKILL 512MB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR 400 (PC 3200) System Memory
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231078

* Computer Case - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811103004

* 350 Watt PSU
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817103012

* 250 GB Sata HDD
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822144701

* DVD-RW
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16827106023

* DVD rom
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16827131409

This is my second build and I never had ANY problems with my first. Well with this one, everything seemed to go OK while installing XP SP2. When the installation of the OS was finished it seemed to take a long time to just bring up the "profiles" and then quite a while to load the desktop. By quite a while I mean literally at least 70 - 80 seconds. So once I got to the desktop of XP I put in the ASUS CD-rom to start installing some of the drivers like VGA and stuff like that. Well when I tried to open the cd via "my computer" it just hung, quite responding. I went to Task Manager and ended the unresponsive "my computer". Well then my entire desktop went away, all of the icons, start menu and stuff. So I killed explorer and restarted the task. It took over 4 minutes to bring back up my desktop!! I know that this is not normal. I know a 2 GHz is not lighting fast but I know a new load with nothing is faster than that. The same type of things continued after doing a hard boot. Just stopped responding on normal little things. I finally reinstalled XP 2 times and continue to get the same type of problems. The system just hangs, stops responding for no reason!! Any ideas what could be wrong?? I’m thinking the board may be bad but I’m not sure. What can/should I do???

Thanks for your help!!

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[Avadann_Kedeth]

After it hung/eventaully came back, did you reboot and try again?

 

[Akifuddin]

Damn seriously, why quadruple post? 4 threads for one damn problem

 

[BobbyD1120]

this is my first post here; I only submitted the post once so I dont know why is it posted 4 times. I did not resubmit the thing 4 times, only once. So please dont flame me if I mistakingly did something wrong to quad post. The only thing I can think of is I checked to "cross post" with the alt.xxx groups and it came back with somekind of error so I just went back and unchecked those and submitted again. Like I said, I did not try to quad post the same thing.

As for the restart question, yes I did restart the system and continue to have the same problems.

 

[Avadann_Kedeth]

Okay, just a check. When Windows builds a profile for the first time it can take several minutes.

That's kind of a tough one to narrow down. Do you have another hard drive you can test it with? That would be my first guess, though motherboards are rather more prone to failure because they have loads more components that can fail. If you are confident that Windows is installed properly, the only thing you really can do is to switch out various parts until it works, and deduce which one is the problem.

 

[BobbyD1120]

are there any hardware tests or anything like that I can try to test the hardware to see if something is failing? I dont have anything software wise or anything so can you maybe point me in a direction to find a utility that can test all hardware?

 

[Jinx13]

Not sure about everything, but for checking the hard drive if it is WD they have a diagnostics util on their site you can try.

 

[czar1020]

for hardware tests you can use memtest, and depending on hd they will have a tester on there web page you can d/l and use. other then that gl with it.update everything bios ect..

 

[Wgfalcon]

the link for your power supply is no longer valid
what brand and how much was it

shutdown disconnect power from both dvd drives and reboot and see if the problem is the same. if this fixes the problem you have a weak power supply.

 

[samir_nayanajaad]

well sounds like you have a heck of a prob to figure out, this is my suggestion.

take out all unneeded stuff like dvd rom sound cards ect. that are just extra

disable evrything you can in bios that is not needed like ide channel 2 or firewire, usb, floppy, onboard sound, anything that is not absolutly needed. this should knock out irq mess ups.

do a full reformat on the hdd and try to install windows once more with this stripped down version of your pc. once in windows with user accounts set up try a few reboots to see if things are okay.

If stuff seems fine go on and install sp2 other drivers as needed and just for a safe measure reboot after each driver install to see if maybe a driver is causeing the slow down. sp2 will slow down a pc a little but not too bad so dont worry if the pc slows a little after that sp2 install.

now get the microsoft updates for xp

once all that is done and if things are okay start to re enable some mobo things like the ide channel usb stuff ect. one at a time to see if any of that is the prob.

then put back in the extra stuff like the dvd rom sound card ect. one at a time and drivers for them also.

by going through all that hopefully you will be able to pin point the prob and fix it.

if the pc is slow from the get go, no extras, bios disabling stuff, the problem might be the mobo hdd or ram. (use only one stick of ram at a time too)

hope that can help you out some

 

[BobbyD1120]

the PSU is a SPARKLE ATX-350PN-B204 ATX 12V 2.0 350W Power Supply - OEM and it was $31.99.

I will try to disconnect the DVD drives and also the case fan tonight and see if maybe that is the problem. I will let you know the status.

I will look around for a Western Digital app to check the HDD to make sure there are not any bad sectors.

Any ideas on what I could use to test the RAM to make sure it all passes?

Samir: Thank you very much for the reply. You mention diabling IRQ's in the BIOS to make sure there are no conflicts. Is there anywhere I could look/check to make sure there are not any currently or do I have to go through and disable them indivually and check them each time?

 

[czar1020]

Ram tester

Link for wd tester

 

[samir_nayanajaad]

memtest 86

Download link

<edit>
for that irq thing just disable everything you dont need, as far as I know the only way to test for IRQ conflicts is to just turn stuff off untill you dont have an IRQ conflict. The only thing that comes to mind for checking this stuff is to click Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools>System Information

In the system info click the + by hardware resources then highlight IRQ's and that should give you a list of IRQ's and what is on them

Most of the time that doesnt happen (IRQ conflicts) but by disabling things like your floppy or fire wire that you never use it frees up system resources and the cpu doesnt have to worry about checking to see if it will get some information from that port so it makes it faster, though not noticable and stupid windows also wont worry about stuff it cant see.
</edit>

 

[czar1020]

from what i understand the link i provided is more current, i cant remember when last time they updated either of them.

 

[BobbyD1120]

ok, stupid ? what version of the memtest do i want to download and what about putting it onto a CD to boot from? I didnt put a floppy in the computer since I figured I would never need it.

When I download the app, can I just burn it onto a bootable CD-rom and run it? Sorry, but can you dummy down the process for me to be able to run the program.

Or is this something I should run from wiht in Windows?

 

[czar1020]

D/l link

just get the zip iso and burn it to a cd... you can use nero or whatever software you use.

gah also make sure bios is set to boot cd drive first

 

[BobbyD1120]

sorry for such a stupid quesiton, but do I need to unzip the files and then burn those to the CD or just burn the d/l'd ISO.zip to the CD?

 

[samir_nayanajaad]

yes un zip it, then just burn the ISO onto a cd, put in cd drive re boot (from cd as stated above then run mem test. and the only acceptable reslut from the test is 0 errors. if you get one send back the ram

btw I added some stuff about IRQs in my second post if you missed it

 

[czar1020]

you will need to unzip that d/l then the file you get is memtest86+-1.55.1.iso that is the file you will burn.

Nero Trial

If you dont have any thing to burn it you can use it. You will want to burn it as an iso, dont just throw the file on the cd.

How to burn iso

that link is a little old but you'll get the idea

 

[BobbyD1120]

well it seems as if the problem was with the ASUS cd that came with my retail mobo. I was getting ready to run some of the diag.'s I have downloaded so I booted up the PC, windows loaded very quickly so I put the CD in and it came right up. No problems at all.

So for the heck of it I played around on the system for a few minutes and nothing went wrong. Everything worked perfect. So I put the ASUS disk in the drive, and boom it locked up when I tried to open it via My computer. So I did a restart the same as before and had the same problems when the ASUS disk was in there.

Anyone ever heard of such a thing, guess I have a bad disk but I didnt think that could lock up the whole system everytime. Im going to give ASUS a call tonight and see if they will send me out a new disk.

Thanks to everyone for all of the valuable insight.

Thanks
bobby

 

[czar1020]

ya, i can actually said i had the same problem once before, had burned a bad dvd damn thing slowed comp down to a halt. dunno wtf but w/e