Screen zappings and Black Screen occurence

[surriyah]

Hello all,

Lately I have been getting zappings when i first boot on my pc (running XP Pro). The start screen is black and I see some white static light (lines?)

whenever I turn on the pc before it settle down to showing the Windows Logo. My graphic card is new (ATI 5770 Radeon Xfire). But this has

happened before i installed the new grahpic card. Also i get black screen for now and then in the middle of work for about a few seconds before it

resume back to whatever I was at (or doing). So far it has not crashed nor freeze. I have 4G Kingston Ram but the System is showing 4G Ram and

it also shows that only 2.9G is useable. Could the ram be the problem? 2 previous sticks were good (showing to be 2G as working-healthy) and

the new additional 2 G shows up as a total of 4G but 2.9 as useable. Could it be a ram slot problem?

MB : Asus A8N32-SLI Bus Clock 200Mghz
CPU: 2.2 ghz AMD athlon 64 socket 939
250G HDD WD with 210GFreespace
ATI Radeon 5700 XFire fully updated


Thank you very much.

 

[Saga Lout]

Hello all,

Lately I have been getting zappings when i first boot on my pc (running XP Pro). The start screen is black and I see some white static light (lines?)

whenever I turn on the pc before it settle down to showing the Windows Logo. My graphic card is new (ATI 5770 Radeon Xfire). But this has

happened before i installed the new grahpic card. Also i get black screen for now and then in the middle of work for about a few seconds before it

resume back to whatever I was at (or doing). So far it has not crashed nor freeze. I have 4G Kingston Ram but the System is showing 4G Ram and

it also shows that only 2.9G is useable. Could the ram be the problem? 2 previous sticks were good (showing to be 2G as working-healthy) and

the new additional 2 G shows up as a total of 4G but 2.9 as useable. Could it be a ram slot problem?

MB : Asus A8N32-SLI Bus Clock 200Mghz
CPU: 2.2 ghz AMD athlon 64 socket 939
250G HDD WD with 210GFreespace
ATI Radeon 5700 XFire fully updated


Thank you very much.

The appearance of the Windows logo is around about the time your graphics card takes over the running of things from the basic graphics that start up. Your system can only use 2.9Gb of RAM because that's where XP maxes out - Vista and W7 can use the whole 4Gb but at the moment, you're over the top. I doubt that's the problem but it might be worth popping one out for a day and then swapping to the other the next day to test the theory. If your new graphics card came with a driver disk, are they the most up-to-date drivers available> Find it in Device Manager and click to Update Driver and the system will wander around the Net looking for a better one.

 

[surriyah]

Hi Saga,

Thank you for your reply. I do not think its a XP maxing out problem. Cos I do have another HDD that has WIN 7 installed and it has the same problem. I do use several different HDD on the same pc (though not at the same time) for different software applications so as not the corrupt some important data. I just sata-swap them HDD. Also, the graphic drivers are up to date. I will pop out some of the rams today to see if it will make any difference. Best regards.