a couplte problems for you guys

[Billiam411]

Hey, i've got a quite a few serious problems with windows xp home.
basically i found a very cheap pci video card (matrox) at a trade show. I install it along with my main card (AIW 9800 pro) because it only has one video output dvi. I plugged in my second monitor, set it up properly with the display settings, and it seemed to work fine. I installed the driver for the matrox card as well. Now when after i restarted my computer, when i login, everything seems to load fine, but when i go to click on something, be it an shortcut icon, taskbar, or start button, nothing happens. However, when i press control alt delete, i see the explorer.exe is using 99% resources! I figure there must be a problem somewhere, so i reboot into safe mode. The same thing happens except now its System Idle Process at 99%. I figure since i cant restore or anything, it'll just freeze up, that i'll repair windows. So i pop the xp cd in my drive, and i choose to repair that installation of windows. It copies various files, and reboots into xp's setup. I let it sit for a while, and it seems to be freezing when 'installing devices'. I let it sit for an hour (when it said 37 minutes remaining) and still nothing. My mouse works fine, and the little animation in the lower right corner seems to work fine as well. I do a hard reboot, and the same thing happens. Next i take out the second video card, same thong. Next i take out my ATI, and put only the matrox in, same thing. Does anyone have an ideas for like a recovery floppy disk or something? I've tried system mechanic's floppy diskette but that didnt work. Do you think that this could be malware? Anyway thats where i am on that problem...


next problem: When i leave a program running for extended periods of time (over night for instance) i always find my pc frozen! This could either be an antivirus scan or antispyware, defrag, or azureus. The same thing happens when i play a few recent games, such as AoE III and BF2. If i play them for more than an hour or so, it'll just freeze, no sound no mouse. This has happened since i built my computer, back in april. It has also happened since i reformatted a little over a month ago.

One other thing. I notice that other than when my computer is POSTing, i've never seen the hard drive activity light on. I've checked the connection and it seems to be fine, i just cant see why.


This is all on the same computer by the way, and here are the specs:
Antec Sonata with stock PSU
AMD Athlon 64 2800+ socket 754
MSI K8N NEO platinum
ATI all in wonder 9800 pro (matrox secondary, 4mb or ram, not sure exact model)
2 X 512 of crucial pc3200 unbuffered DDR SDRAM
2 Western digital hard drives, one 120GB (os installed on it), and 160Gb
Sony DRU 710-A

Any help here? thanks

 

[tejarz]

Just to let you know, System Idle Process isn't bad, its how much of your processor isn't being used. Have you gone about uninstalling the card both in Windows and physically to make sure its the card? I'd also try the usual spyware/virus scans to make sure.

I'm not very familiar with the Antec Sonata, but the two things that stick out in my mind are the power supply and cooling. The power supply might be bad or not giving enough juice to your system. Another thing could be that your system is running hot. Are you running anything like Motherboard Monitor to check temperatures inside the case?

 

[Billiam411]

well right now my system temp is at 28C and my cpu is at 39C, i dont think thats the problem.

The sonata came with a truepower 380W PSU, i dont think that is the problem either.
How do you think i should go about running AV and AS utlities if my computer will freeze up with explorer.exe? Is there a bootdisk that a software has that i boot to to run a scan?

 

[Billiam411]

ok new update, i restarted the computer without the xp cd in. it booted into setup, and asked for the disc. I pressed cancel, and it said something to the effect of 'operation aborted, cancelled by user, press ok to view error log'
i press ok, and at the bottom it says fatal error, a component that windows needs to continue setup could not be installed (the cd). However, above that, maybe 8 or 10 times (the number of times i've tried installing before freezing) its says:

***

Error:
Setup encountered an error while trying to set system security.

An extended error has occurred.



***

I assume this narrows down the problem, any new ideas? (other then reformatting )