Heya fellas, I'm working on my friends computer and I'm not making much progress, sooo I thought I'd see what some of you could come up with.
Here's the situation, I sold my friend this computer, which was my old computer before I upgraded(Hmm I think it's a Athlon 64 X2 2800(?), 2gigs ram, Nvidia 7800GT(latest drivers), ASUS A8N SLI Premium Motherboard, using latest Nvidia drivers for it, and 550watt Antec power supply) . It was working perfectly for him until he decided he needed to re-install WinXP because for some reason he couldn't access some websites. Well being that he doesn't know jack about computers he had another friend of his install Windows for him. Well, the guy decided he'd swap around hard drives, and put the old smaller slower hard drive as the main drive and the newer, faster, big drive as the secondary drive, and who knows what else, and shortly after he got it back he started having problems that got worse and worse.
I thought at first it was a over heating issue as he said it would be okay for an hour or so and then he'd get bad pixelations on the screen, and the lettering would be all garbled and he could barely read anything(I've found this can happen as soon as the computer starts, so I'm ruling out a Windows driver problem). All the fans are working, including the expensive video card fan, so I'm *** it's not a heat issue. He said at first he could just wiggle the monitor connection and it'd work but now it doesn't help. Well yesterday I thought I fixed the problem somehow by clearing the CMOS, as it booted up fine after that and seemed stable for about an hour with me playing videos and playing GTA:San Adreas, as he said he had problems doing both.
However the next day the problems were back. I tried updating the BIOS but that seemed to make things even worse as the computer would get the blue screen of death when it was about to boot WinXP up. Somehow several attempts later I was able to boot into Windows again but the bad pixelations were there for almost every boot. However on a rare occasion it would boot up fine with little to no pixelations. I'm starting to think the graphics card is screwed up or the mother board, but I'm also curious about the power supply. The fan is running on it but it barely puts out any air at all. The one in my computer now blows pretty hard, so dunno.
I was going to update the BIOS, or I should say revert the BIOS to an earlier version, in case I may have fuggered things up with the latest BIOS, but I need to be in DOS to do it apparently, and I don't have any floppy disks, or a floppy drive for that matter in my computers. I made a bootable CDROM but it kept giving me insufficient memory errors when I tried to use the update program. :/
I'm *** this is a hardware or BIOS problem since the problems occur before entering the OS, but I'm not sure. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance!!
Here's the situation, I sold my friend this computer, which was my old computer before I upgraded(Hmm I think it's a Athlon 64 X2 2800(?), 2gigs ram, Nvidia 7800GT(latest drivers), ASUS A8N SLI Premium Motherboard, using latest Nvidia drivers for it, and 550watt Antec power supply) . It was working perfectly for him until he decided he needed to re-install WinXP because for some reason he couldn't access some websites. Well being that he doesn't know jack about computers he had another friend of his install Windows for him. Well, the guy decided he'd swap around hard drives, and put the old smaller slower hard drive as the main drive and the newer, faster, big drive as the secondary drive, and who knows what else, and shortly after he got it back he started having problems that got worse and worse.
I thought at first it was a over heating issue as he said it would be okay for an hour or so and then he'd get bad pixelations on the screen, and the lettering would be all garbled and he could barely read anything(I've found this can happen as soon as the computer starts, so I'm ruling out a Windows driver problem). All the fans are working, including the expensive video card fan, so I'm *** it's not a heat issue. He said at first he could just wiggle the monitor connection and it'd work but now it doesn't help. Well yesterday I thought I fixed the problem somehow by clearing the CMOS, as it booted up fine after that and seemed stable for about an hour with me playing videos and playing GTA:San Adreas, as he said he had problems doing both.
However the next day the problems were back. I tried updating the BIOS but that seemed to make things even worse as the computer would get the blue screen of death when it was about to boot WinXP up. Somehow several attempts later I was able to boot into Windows again but the bad pixelations were there for almost every boot. However on a rare occasion it would boot up fine with little to no pixelations. I'm starting to think the graphics card is screwed up or the mother board, but I'm also curious about the power supply. The fan is running on it but it barely puts out any air at all. The one in my computer now blows pretty hard, so dunno.
I was going to update the BIOS, or I should say revert the BIOS to an earlier version, in case I may have fuggered things up with the latest BIOS, but I need to be in DOS to do it apparently, and I don't have any floppy disks, or a floppy drive for that matter in my computers. I made a bootable CDROM but it kept giving me insufficient memory errors when I tried to use the update program. :/
I'm *** this is a hardware or BIOS problem since the problems occur before entering the OS, but I'm not sure. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance!!
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