Anusha
08-15-2006, 08:03 PM
I'm having a strange problem with my PC. It's been there for a while, but it appears randomly, and dissapears for, sometimes months, and comes up again out of nowhere.:confused:
Symptoms:
1. I would randomly get BSODs (Blue Screen of Deaths - normal Windows "stop errors"), randomly.
2. If it doesn't show up BSODs, it would freeze at Windows, maybe couple of minutes after booting into Windows, or maybe after hours of operations
3. If I do anything with the hard drives (such as remove a hard drive, add a new hard drive etc.), sometimes the PC wouldn't POST. No beep. Monitor goes to standby. Sometimes, it still wouldn't work after turning the power off and then, on. If I press RESET button a couple of times (not necessarily two times), it would POST, and things will be back to normal.
4. If I would knock my leg against the chasis (my chasis is kept in a lower position, which is a vulnerable position where my leg can knock against the chasis), sometimes, the problems would appear (if they weren't there for a while).
What I've done to temporarily resolve this issue:
1. Tightening of the components (memory, video card, hard drives, CPU) to their slots, ports etc. This works most of the times, which makes me think that this problem is related to some loose connection(s)
What I've tried so far, without any success:
1. Reinstall Windows. Obviously it didn't work.
2. Check for memory. When I checked for memory, I had Windows Vista Build 5472.5 installed on my system, and it has an inbuilt memory checker. I checked with it, and it said my memory is OK. I didn't try to do a thorough memory test with Memtest86+ though
3. Remove the Hynix RAM, keeping only the identical Kingston RAM to see if there was a compatibility issue. Problems appears even when I removed it.
4. Ran Prime95 and two instances of SuperPI 8M check simultaneously, and they finished OK (while Prime95 was still running as it is a continuously running stress testing application). Seemed to be ok. Because when I overclocked to a point where the CPU couldn't handle, even a single SuperPI instance would give an error and stop. But to be on the safer side, I reduced the CPU frequency by 22MHz (reduced FSB by 2MHz: from 197MHz to 195MHz)
Addition to this, I have seen a lot of people having trouble with Gigabyte motherboards. For example, I have seen the top of the end 8KNXP (for S478 P4 CPUs) fail just after the warranty period was exceeded. I'm on a GA-7N400 motherboard, which pretty much belongs to the same era. This is for the AMD AthlonXP CPUs.
Does anyone here have any (bad) experiences with this motherboard. By the way, I have the latest BIOS (version F11) installed. I still have warranty, but without solid proof that the motherboard is the culprit, they wouldn't change it.
Any thoughts on this matter is greatly appreciated. Hopefully people read this long post :)
Symptoms:
1. I would randomly get BSODs (Blue Screen of Deaths - normal Windows "stop errors"), randomly.
2. If it doesn't show up BSODs, it would freeze at Windows, maybe couple of minutes after booting into Windows, or maybe after hours of operations
3. If I do anything with the hard drives (such as remove a hard drive, add a new hard drive etc.), sometimes the PC wouldn't POST. No beep. Monitor goes to standby. Sometimes, it still wouldn't work after turning the power off and then, on. If I press RESET button a couple of times (not necessarily two times), it would POST, and things will be back to normal.
4. If I would knock my leg against the chasis (my chasis is kept in a lower position, which is a vulnerable position where my leg can knock against the chasis), sometimes, the problems would appear (if they weren't there for a while).
What I've done to temporarily resolve this issue:
1. Tightening of the components (memory, video card, hard drives, CPU) to their slots, ports etc. This works most of the times, which makes me think that this problem is related to some loose connection(s)
What I've tried so far, without any success:
1. Reinstall Windows. Obviously it didn't work.
2. Check for memory. When I checked for memory, I had Windows Vista Build 5472.5 installed on my system, and it has an inbuilt memory checker. I checked with it, and it said my memory is OK. I didn't try to do a thorough memory test with Memtest86+ though
3. Remove the Hynix RAM, keeping only the identical Kingston RAM to see if there was a compatibility issue. Problems appears even when I removed it.
4. Ran Prime95 and two instances of SuperPI 8M check simultaneously, and they finished OK (while Prime95 was still running as it is a continuously running stress testing application). Seemed to be ok. Because when I overclocked to a point where the CPU couldn't handle, even a single SuperPI instance would give an error and stop. But to be on the safer side, I reduced the CPU frequency by 22MHz (reduced FSB by 2MHz: from 197MHz to 195MHz)
Addition to this, I have seen a lot of people having trouble with Gigabyte motherboards. For example, I have seen the top of the end 8KNXP (for S478 P4 CPUs) fail just after the warranty period was exceeded. I'm on a GA-7N400 motherboard, which pretty much belongs to the same era. This is for the AMD AthlonXP CPUs.
Does anyone here have any (bad) experiences with this motherboard. By the way, I have the latest BIOS (version F11) installed. I still have warranty, but without solid proof that the motherboard is the culprit, they wouldn't change it.
Any thoughts on this matter is greatly appreciated. Hopefully people read this long post :)