Author Topic: Freakish behavior (Read 365 times)

flakbait · « **on:** July 18, 2003, 03:40:38 AM »

About two weeks ago my system suddenly slowed to a crawl, then locked up. I was just roaming the net, and WHAM! The mouse slowed to a near stand-still. Yon trusty three-finner salute gives me the usual reboot and I'm back in business. Fast forward two days: I'm playing Live for Speed (damned funky and his racing links!) and the machine does it again. Ok, I figure it's high time I FDISK'ed and reinstalled Winblows 98SE since I haven't done it in a year. Alt-F4 won't give me Windoze, and a three-finger salute spits up a BSOD "WARNING! Your system has become dangerously unstable!"

Yikes! So I thwack the reset switch and wait.......

Nothing. Checking the Dbracket gives me "Processor Init Failed", so I figure it's a bad CPU. I turn off the power supply, hit the on/off case switch, turn the juice back on, and it boots right up! Funny thing, Safe Mode works fine and so does DOS, so I reinstall anyway and start getting my box back up to snuff. Not four days later, it bogs down and stops again. And again it won't warm-boot from Winblows. I called around to a couple guys who's opinions I trust, and they all say "It's either your mobo, CPU, or RAM". I nod and start thinking over replacement options, until I called the local geek at my ISP. He says "tear it down to the bare mobo, dust it, and reinstall the whole works"

I do just that, and lo! The beast hums right back to life....for one day. Then I gotta reboot after installing WinAMP and it stops dead again. Yargh! This time, I eyeball Dbracket and the little lights say "Real Time Clock crapped out". Say huh? Last time it was the CPU, and now the clock?

I'm running an MSI K7T266 Pro2a mobo, 900MHz AMD T-bird, one stick of Samsung 256 PC2100DDR, and an ATi 7k 64mb AGP card. The hard drives, video, CD drives, and floppy all work. I can run DOS or Windoze safe mode for all eternity, but half the time on a full boot it'll freeze on me at some point. The fun part is, I can still use the mouse sometimes. What makes it fun is that ol Windos won't respond to ANYTHING, yet the mouse still moves. BTW, my BIOS is set to defaults for the most part, with a few items turned off that I don't need/use.

Any ideas on who the culprit might be?

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Flakbait [Delta6]
Delta Six's Flight School
Put the P-61B in Aces High

Modas · « **Reply #1 on:** July 18, 2003, 09:01:45 AM »

When I built my first computer, I had a similar problem. Turned out to be a bad stick of ram.

Go out and get a ram checking program or if you have multiple sticks, start swapping them out to see if you can isolate the offending stick...

G/L

flakbait · « **Reply #2 on:** July 19, 2003, 12:36:18 AM »

Thanks, Modas. I ran memtest86 through the whole nine yard test earlier without any errors. Though when it rebooted on exit (run-on-boot proggy) the Dbracket caughed up another "Real-Time Clock error".

Temps aren't too bad: 46-50C CPU, 34-38C case, so that isn't it. Wattage isn't a problem either (250w p/s) or it would've started doing this back in Dec when I dropped a WD 40GB HDD in. Sound/video work fine, even after clean driver installs and updates. Haven't tested any games yet because last time it went ape while running one. As best I can figure, either the processor or mobo is the offending idiot. Here in a bit I'm gonna snag a processor test program and see if that isn't it.

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Flakbait [Delta6]
Delta Six's Flight School
Put the P-61B in Aces High

Pfunk · « **Reply #3 on:** July 19, 2003, 03:26:18 PM »

WOW your only running a 250W PS you sure that isnt the problem?

flakbait · « **Reply #4 on:** July 20, 2003, 01:47:13 AM »

Honestly, I don't know Pfunk. It's worked fine for 8 months, and now is when I have trouble. Back in Dec I dropped a new HDD in to take the load off my old one, which now only has Windoze on it.

I ran the processor check for two hours and that came up clean, even after two burn-in tests. Sure enough, about an hour later the older HDD did a little grind like it was writing something, and she started to stutter. Every other second (literally) everything would stop, then it'd work, then it'd stop....madness! What floored me was that once I told Winblows to shutdown it stopped that off-and-on stuff and just shutdown normaly. Plus, Explorer is listed as "not responding" when this pausing is going on. Occasionally I can get the system back when I End Task on it. I'm gonna try a resh re-install of Winblows and see if that doesn't fix it.

At the moment money is real tight, so replacing parts isn't an option.

<--EDIT-->

Found the problem: my CD burner apparently cooked itself. Once I pulled the plug all the evil demons were expelled and the magic came back! Reboots of every kind are no problem, no Dbracket errors, no hanging, and no BSOD's yet! Been running about four hours with nary a hiccup.

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Flakbait [Delta6]
Delta Six's Flight School
Put the P-61B in Aces High

Thorns · « **Reply #5 on:** July 20, 2003, 07:38:18 PM »

I had the same thing, went through everything, thinking the m/b was faulty, because I swapped every other component from my second box, still had the problem, but read somewhere on one of the boards, this guy had the same situation, and found out if was ZoneAlarm causing the problem. Removed ZoneAlarm, and haven't had any problems since.

Thorns

bloom25 · « **Reply #6 on:** July 21, 2003, 02:33:25 PM »

Most likely it is the motherboard. (The real time clock signal is derived by from a clock generator chip on the motherboard.)

Thorns · « **Reply #7 on:** July 21, 2003, 07:31:45 PM »

Bloom25,

It was the motherboard. MSI KT7 Pro 2-A were fast(3 years ago), but not too reliable. I have seen more people have trouble with this board more than any other. Got a tried and true AOpen AK77 Pro A 133 now as the replacement, as the computer shop swapped my 133Mhz SDRAM for 333Mhz DDR, so it was an upgrade. Now I can go with a AMD XP 2600+ ;-). No more MSI or FCI m/b's for me. We always appreciate your input.

Thorns