System stability issues

zeuseng06

Posts: 26   +0
My old machine has about given up the ghost. I play a lot of the Facebook apps games and am having a tremendous amount of trouble with them. I understand these games are of the beta flash format. The problem I am having is very slow play, and on Car Town, very erratic performance when racing. Now, here are the issues with my machine. Of 3gb RAM installed, I am only seeing 2.09gb. One of the slots is out on the MB leaving me with 3. The machine has crashed bad 2 times, and after having it wiped and loaded by the local shop the performance and stability just keeps getting worse. I have a lot of new components in the machine and it would be more cost effective to fix what I have. My question is, what do I need to be running for components to play the Facebook games fast and smooth?
Here is a break down of the machine:
Started as a Compaq SR1426NX Presario
OS: Windows XP SP3
HD: Seagate 160gb
Opt. Drives: 2- Lite On IDE
MB: ASUS goldfish3
PS: Corsair 450W bronze
VC: PNY- GS8400HD 512MB
I'm thinking of installing a MB/CPU combo using an i5 cpu and a good ASUS MB w/ tri chnl memory and installing 64bit Windows7. I do not know if my programs and utilities will work with the new OS.
I just am hoping that one of you experts here can help me out so as I can play these games and enjoy them!
Thank-you!
PS- Hope I posted in the right Forum
 
run two tests, one for memory and one for the hard drive. For the memory run memtest86 from a boot cd or floppy (you might have to set you bios to boot from cd first to run an iso or floppy first if it has one).
For the hard drive download Seagates utility and test your drive. I had slow downs once and couldn't figure it out. There is a setting in alot of PC's in the bios to enable Smart Drive and Smart Drive will warn you if a drive is failing. If it is and you wait too long, you can loose everything. If you catch it early you can clone the old drive to a new one (it can take a while cause the old drive is slow) and seagate has a utility for that as well.
Besides that there's the old registry cleaning and hard drive defragmentation to run. If you have never cleaned the registry or defraged the hard drive, well.. you know.
 
i'll check it out...thanks!...did you get a chance to review my response to your advice on run/regedit 2 Tom's yet...still no luck getting the drives functioning. really don't want to take it back to the shop...trust issues!...anyway, changed the data values, using both 0x00000091 and 95 to no avail. support shopped on google and they didn't help either. the drives are good- pulled them out at 3am and put them in the dell xps 400 and they are fine.
 
No I haven't been back to that thread but if they work in the other PC I hate to say your probably looking at a nasty issue there. Hardware - Software its impossible to say but I do remember having installed a roxio burning software once that turned off auto run, softwares are know to do that for their own nefarious purposes. Anything you installed recently that could have to do with the drives? Even video converters sometimes have a burner attached. Then again it was Roxios' disabling that lead me to the registry fix in the first place and if changing it did nothing I'm at a loss right now. I hate to say it but after so long I would probably end up transfering my data and reinstalling the OS but that's me and I don't expect it would make things easier for you, just open a can of worms
 
just did the wipe/install. seems i do have a roxio pkg, though. a guru at the shop today told me that the latest round of windows security updates has deleted autorun (hmmm!?) because some of the latest infections can enter through the opt drives via download. i've put a shortcut to E: & F: on the desktop. as mentioned we run/regedit'd the drives using the hex data values you suggested-ie- '91' & '95' and they both work(?). my r&r is the facebook gaming apps as applied by zynga & cie and my p4 prescott is banged out @ 100%/49 processes and these games volume of data has grown beyond the capacity of my rig. soooo!, i'm looking at a 64bit win7 complete os w/ amd phenom 2 6core cpu, velociraptor hd 600gb. mobo not decided. for those gaming apps to function FAST, a lot of graphic data has to move quickly. i'm too green to play with any raid formats as of now. i would welcome any advice as to a grad and post grad level textbook that runs the gambit on hardware, software, programming and networking. the one i saw @ barnes & noble was $350! i'm grateful to all at these forums for any advice on all pc matters. if i'm given good advice, we can run with it and apply. statistical analysis is a forte from my grad and post grad mechanical engineering studies. the tools are similar yet the medium and values are different, is all. thanks to you folks, we'll get there. at my age there is no time for classrooms and labs. don't need the degrees and/or certs. :)
 
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