Re: Freaky behaviour on XP system- Help needed.

That motherboard would only support 333Mhz or PC2700 DDR RAM.
You can get away with faster RAM using a slower FSB, but not the other
way around.

Issues could be memory stick miss-matching, best to use a Hardware
inventory tool that can interrogate the memory for it's timing values. If
they are significantly different, I would try running the box with only a
single stick or RAM or get a single stick of say 512 RAM to avoid the
timing variances.


"FayeC" <fayec_nospam@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:vHA7e.1052$K24.429@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>A friend's computer out of a sudden started cycling during startup..it
>would
> get to the screen telling them to choose which installation (weird since
> it
> only had one anyways)...if you chose the top one it would go back to the
> bios screen, if you chose the bottom it would go to a screen telling us it
> is restarting the install...
> He told me to go ahead and format so I used a win98 boot disk and tried to
> format c...well...I got an error saying that C didn't have a recognizeable
> FAT partition (which is fine if you had a NTSF but I have always formated
> my
> own XP computer this way and it's using NTSF and I never got this error
> before)...it wouldn't format C at all...
> I then changed the boot order and booted from the Windows XP cd and
> reinstalled windows. In the process I selected for a full NTSF format of
> the
> partition.
> Well...he has a ASUS P4S533-E, P4 1.6 with 512 RAM (just got 256 more 2
> months ago) and after I finished installing windows, Word, Powerpoint and
> Norton the computer was crawling to a halt....very slow...then it started
> rebooting out of nowhere....
> I managed to update the virus definitions but the computer crashed every
> time I tried to open Norton to tell it to run a full scan...
> My questions are:
> 1- Could this be a virus in his boot sector and if so how do I eliminate
> it?
> 2- The computer had a minor upgrade 2 months ago...the computer store
> added
> 256 DDR400 RAM to his computer...that made me curious since chances are
> his
> old RAM was not a DDR400 stick as the computer was 3 years old...Could
> this
> be a hardware conflict? I didn't see anything else wrong in the hardware
> manager though.
>
> Any help is very appreciated,
>
>
> FayeC
>
>
>


.

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