My (nearly) 6 year old PC is having some problems.
ASUS A7N8X 2.0 Deluxe
AMD Athlon XP 3200+
1.5Gb DDR-333 RAM
ATI Radeon 9800 pro
Windows XP SP3
Generic 'winpower' 600W PSU some bozo chose and installed when the old 360W one (that had worked for almost 5 years) stopped working.
This computer freezes during boot up in various places 3 or 4 times before it manages to boot windows. In windows, the computer may freeze quite often, but less often than in boot up stage.
Also, sometimes after pressing reset, the CPUs clock speed is halved from 2200mhz to 1100mhz and the RAMs speed reduced from 166mhz dual channel mode to 100mhz. Once even the setting that produces an image instead of the boot.. um stuff became enabled. By itself.
Things I have tried:
RAM - I have ran memtest86+ 2.01 which found no errors
Graphics Card - Played Half Life 2 on meidum-high and UT3beta demo on Low for a few hours to see how the GPU copes, it coped fine running fairly recent Catalyst 7.8 drivers (I read these suited my older card better more than the more recent driver optimized for newer cards). This was the most fun part of trying to 'diagnose' my PC.
Boot Sector - Thinking part of the problem might be a boot sector virus. I ran the 'fixmbr' command after booting from the Windows CD, however a message appeared advising CAUTION because I had a non-standard or invalid Master boot record and that partitions may get damaged if I proceeded, so I said no, and didn't make a new MBR.
I don't know what to try next so I would like a wide ranging opinion of what might be wrong with my computer, please.
Thanks in advance to useful replies,
John
ASUS A7N8X 2.0 Deluxe
AMD Athlon XP 3200+
1.5Gb DDR-333 RAM
ATI Radeon 9800 pro
Windows XP SP3
Generic 'winpower' 600W PSU some bozo chose and installed when the old 360W one (that had worked for almost 5 years) stopped working.
This computer freezes during boot up in various places 3 or 4 times before it manages to boot windows. In windows, the computer may freeze quite often, but less often than in boot up stage.
Also, sometimes after pressing reset, the CPUs clock speed is halved from 2200mhz to 1100mhz and the RAMs speed reduced from 166mhz dual channel mode to 100mhz. Once even the setting that produces an image instead of the boot.. um stuff became enabled. By itself.
Things I have tried:
RAM - I have ran memtest86+ 2.01 which found no errors
Graphics Card - Played Half Life 2 on meidum-high and UT3beta demo on Low for a few hours to see how the GPU copes, it coped fine running fairly recent Catalyst 7.8 drivers (I read these suited my older card better more than the more recent driver optimized for newer cards). This was the most fun part of trying to 'diagnose' my PC.
Boot Sector - Thinking part of the problem might be a boot sector virus. I ran the 'fixmbr' command after booting from the Windows CD, however a message appeared advising CAUTION because I had a non-standard or invalid Master boot record and that partitions may get damaged if I proceeded, so I said no, and didn't make a new MBR.
I don't know what to try next so I would like a wide ranging opinion of what might be wrong with my computer, please.
Thanks in advance to useful replies,
John