freezing

[Yode]

Hey everyone,
my other post seems to have dissapeared so I am gonna re post here.
My comp keeps freezing up especially with 3D games. Is there a way to tell if your video card is overheating? I have a geForce2 GTS 64 MB. I took out my sound card (sound blaster live value) and that seemed to make things a little more stable, but now I seem to be freezing all the time browseing the net, ect. I have an EpoX mobo 8KTA2 and a 1.2 ghz amd athlon proc. I checked my memory with CTSPD and it says my memory is fine (256mb PC133). my floppy drive doesn't seem to work and when I run sandra it says error with the floppy drive and with my DVDrom and CDRW. Any ideas?
Thanks a lot
P.S - does anyone know what the best setup is for 1 hard drive and 2 cdroms? should I have hard drive set as master with DVD on slave and then CDRW with separate IDE cable?

 

[Yode]

Any ideas?

 

[noko]

Open up your case and if you have a fan direct the air into your case. If it is a heat problem then you should notice a big difference in stability.

 

[Yode]

tried that, and monitored heat didn't help

 

[lhgpoobaa]

cas 2 or cas 3 rated ram?
overclocked graphics at all?
is it a via motherboard?
latest drivers?
what version directx & detonator drivers?
what rating for you powersupply? 300W?

my Unreal tournament was having great troubles until i finally found a directx/detonator combo that works.. and one of the problems wasnt a video problem, the memory overflowed when playing UT, and my system ground to a halt.
now, no such issues (yet). about time i think.
tell me the above things you have... some more info might help us evaluate your problem


"i love the smell of Overclocking in the morning!" Says my Hamster.

 

[Yode]

Hi, thanks for the replies
dont know about cas 2 or 3, how do I find out?
Its a via chipset KT133
nothing is overclocked
direct X 8.0A
not sure about the det drivers
powersupply is 300W

Hope this helps

 

[lhgpoobaa]

allright. this is what you do:

A. press delete at startup and enter the bios. go to the processor and memory section and see what your memory settings are. ram speed is what your looking for. it will be something like 100/133 and timings 3,3,3 or 2,2,2 or maybe [auto].
if you have generic low quality ram it may not be able to handle the lower cas rating 2. but i suspect that aint the issue.

B. as you have a delightful Via chipset (vomit bucket please) i highly reccomend you toodle over to the via website
http://www.via.com.tw
and find the latest bios update for your board AND via 4in1 drivers. i believe the latest ver is 4.32.

C. your directx should be ok... but ive personally ahve had some problems with 8.0. 8.1 is around if you want to give them a try.

D. go out and find the latest certified detonator drivers. 12.41 are the latest official ones. they can help alot.

E. try your system after doing all that. if your still having the same prob come back. and please... all info you can collect is helpful. sometimes the smallest piece of evidence can solve it.

"i love the smell of Overclocking in the morning!" Says my Hamster.

 

[Guest]

I have a skeaning suspicion that your MB was bought about May? vio had a bad batch of chipsets go out in April, and jsut now have cleaned that mess up. What happens is that you get freezes when you set your bios to anything over 1 Ghz with the AMD Athlon processor. Try setting your bus to 100, with will limit your processor to about 900 MGhz. If it runs stable, your chip set on teh MB is bad. You will ahve no problem exchanging it for a new one. I might suggest a MB from MSI, being that they ahve 6 PCI slots instead of 4 like the ASUS. However, they are harder to set up IRQs in the BIOS than is the ASUS. However, you can set everythign to AUTO, adn manuallly set the IRQs in Windows, which overides the BIOS assignments once in Windows. Good luck.

 

[Yode]

I cant find the memory thing anywhere? and I think its the low quality generic ram but not totally sure.
I downloaded the latest VIA drivers but that didn't seem to help.
Could this have anything to do with my network card?
I stripped everything down to video card, network card and dvd/floppy drive. Also the freezing is getting more random. Sometimes it freezes in 5minutes, sometimes in 10 hours.
Also, I bought my mobo last year so I dont think its that.
thanks

 

[Guest]

Naw, if you bought it last year, you're probably ok. If you think your ram is bad, buy a stick of 128 meg ram and take the other out for a while. RAM will do that. You can get the 128 megs of ram for about 20 bucks.

 

[lhgpoobaa]

you could just have a dud mobo or power supply.
nothings perfect. [-peep-] does happen.

back in the old days of intell dominance, i got a lovely new LX motherboard.
turned it on and nothing. not a cracker. not a beep. me and my friend tested everything on the old rig and turned out ok.

just a dud board.


"i love the smell of Overclocking in the morning!" Says my Hamster.

 

[arsend]

There are little stickers on most memory that gives you a visual description of the lantency, speed and memory amount. Take the momory out and see if you have these. If you don't, try replacing them with a new batch. If you see no improvment, you can always return the memory or sell it to a friend.

If it works for you then don't fix it.

 

[Guest]

To answer your IDE linking question:

I'm going to assume you have an ATA100/7200rpm HDD. Now you need to consider what you're going to be doing more with your setup. If you plan on making disc to disc copies a whole lot, then here's the setup:
-HDD as the Master on IDE1 and DVD as Slave on IDE1
-CDRW as Master on IDE2
This is because an IDE cable can't read and write at the same time, so if you set the two drives on separate cables, you can read and write at the same time.

Now, if you really, really care about performance, then I would stick with:
-HDD as Master on IDE1
-CDRW as Master on IDE2 and DVD as Slave on IDE2
This way the slower spec'd CDRW won't slow down your ATA100 drive.

These are just things that I assume are correct. Anyone please feel free to post corrections.