Re: What on earth is happening - long
From: Boyd B. Daugherty (bdaugh_at_comcast.net)
Date: 09/24/04
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Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 13:55:16 -0500
Hello Louie, I have a Gigabyte board as well and my board seemed to cause
the memory to fail after a short period of time. (4 times) I believe your
board is a 333MHZ FSB system as is mine. Gigabyte's web sit says that PC3200
will work in this board as was the case with mine. I found out that this was
causing the memory failure. You need to set the memory at 333 instead of
400. I would get a copy of Memtest and check your memory. It looks to me
like defective memory. Hope this helps.
"Louie" <me@privacy.net> wrote in message
news:1096049131.9qHx5AW8dqQssoPr8/rXCA@teranews...
> Please help me from tearing out what is left of my hair! :-)
>
> About 22 months ago, I bought what I thought was a nice Gigabyte
> m/board, (GA-7VAXP) a
> 2100 Athlon, 60 gig Maxtor drive and set it all up under 98se.
> I had quite a few problems (very often with Outlook Express), but
> also strange things like losing the HDD, then it would be recognised
> soon after, and any number of system lockups.
>
> Anyway, after getting fed up with all this, I decided to migrate to
> XP Pro. This was been a complete nightmare. I seemed to spend more
> time putting problems right than using the machine!
> Setting up XP was OK at first, but when I upped the memory from
> DDR2100 to DDR3200 it would not install unless I put the DRR2100 back
> in.
>
> Using it would give me blue screens with all sorts of messages,
> usually the dreaded DRIVERL_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL, and numerous
> spontaneous reboots, usually with a split-second blue screen so I
> could not determine the cause.
>
> I'd be working merrily away (again often on OE6) and the thing would
> just reboot itself for no reason I could see, losing my work. I
> discovered that there was a bug in one of the OE updates and managed
> to get that dealt with for a time.
>
> I suspected a virus or Trojan, but this did not seem to be the case
> as virus scans would find nothing, and anyway, I'd fdisk /mbr'ed and
> then set up all new partitions before re-installing Win 98 and then
> XP later on. I had all the latest bios updates and driver files
> from the G/byte website as well as re-setting the bios before
> updating by shorting the mobo pins as per manual.
>
> Thinking I may have a hardware problem (I've always suspected the
> mobo - see later), I replaced the HDD for a new 80 gig - same
> problems after a while.
> Then I replaced the 256 Samsung DDR2100 with the same of Crucial
> DDR3200.
> All was OK for a while, but eventually the problems recurred.
>
> However, in general, things would last for about 2-3 weeks or so
> before problems became so impossible that I'd have to re-install.
> I could always tell they were on their way because, after boot-up,
> (which would by then be taking longer and longer) the signs were -
>
> Despite disabling the FDD on bootup, after bootup the desktop would
> appear and then something would try to access the floppy. There
> would be a delay where I could do nothing (clicking an icon would
> just cause further delay and the hourglass + a freeze-up), and then
> there would be another few attempts to access the floppy drive.
> Then the desktop would refresh and all would be accessible. Usually -
> sometimes
> everything would hang and I'd have to be patient while it did what
> it did before I could start working on it. I ensured that there was
> nothing whatever in the startup files or startup group.
>
> Sometimes the machine would refuse to boot and tell me there was a
> problem and please start again.
> Very often INDEED the thing would crash and ask me to report the
> problem to Microsoft which I did. It always said that it was a
> device driver causing the problem. However, I could not see what
> device driver it might be.
>
> I began to strongly suspect Norton Systemworks and removed it, and
> although the problems seemed to ease, they did not go away entirely.
> Then when I was trying to set up the RAID on the G/byte board it
> just would not work at all unless the drives were set up as ATA 133
> drives, which XP would recognise.
>
> However, eventually I just could not connect to the
> net at all using the built in LAN or with a separate NIC. I called
> my ISP tech support people and the machine would not even see
> 127.0.0.1, much less the LAN card, the cable modem or the router.
> I took it to a friend's shop and we tried everything. It would not
> connect to his ADSL line with the internal LAN, or an external card.
> When we tried re-installing XP we just could not do a thing. It
> blue-screened all the time.
>
> Unfortunately, in frustration his lad pulled every cable from the
> mobo and tried to set it all up again on Win 98 and it would not
> even do that. I took it back home and next day Ghosted over the
> partition from my backup HDD.
>
> I tried to connect again. This time it did, both with the internal
> NIC and with a external in a PCI slot. This of course re-installed
> XP. It worked OK and I thought my problems were over. Ha! Never
> count your chickens, etc ...
>
> The same old stuff started happening and I threw the mobo in the box,
> chucked it on a shelf and installed an Asus board which was a piece of
> piss to set up and I've never had a problem with anything in almost 15
> months.
>
> Anyway, I then found the Gigabyte crap again and decided to return it to
> Giga UK in Milton Keynes. I paid £18.20 for the RMA and to be fair, it
> came back in about 5 days. From the incomprehensible paperwork sent
> back with it it seems there was a bios data error and it looks like they
> replaced the bios chip. However this is odd, as it is a dual bios board
> and I'd tried booting from either bios and whatever way, it still stayed
> knackered.
>
> When it was returned I sent it to my pal mentioned above and asked him
> to try it out. He reckoned it took about 5 minutes to even recognise
> the board on bootup and when he tried to install XP, it took 20 minutes
> to even get to the stage when it wanted to format the drive before
> installing Windows!
>
> I've asked them to take it back again and check it, but they seem
> reluctant. Was it a waste of £90-odd at the time and are all Gigabyte
> boards so rubbish? Any ideas?
>
>
>
>
>
> First setup -
>
> Gigabyte GA7-VAXP
> AMD Athlon 2100
> Samsung 256 - DDR 2100 (later changed to Crucial 256 - DDR3200)
> Maxtor ATA133 60 gig HDD (later changed to 80 gig with 60 as backup
> drive)
> ATI Radeon 7000
> Liteon DVD
> Asus CD/RW
> Eventually 2 x 2.1 gig Fujistu tried to set up as RAID, then ATA133
> Macron 300w PSU (this may well not be beefy enough)
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
- Next message: Haggis: "Re: 16 bit subsystem?"
- Previous message: Rock: "Re: 'Arlarm clock' For XP SP2"
- In reply to: Louie: "What on earth is happening - long"
- Next in thread: Wislu Plethora: "Re: What on earth is happening - long"
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