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Mushroom Prince
Gawd
- Joined
- Feb 20, 2004
- Messages
- 532
I usually don't -like- to post " DEAR GOD HELP ME" threads in hard forum but I find myself doing it a lot lately. THere is at least one or two things wrong with my system. Let me give you the whole story.
I built this as my first computer with the help of my friend about a year ago.
*skip through this just to hear the problem*
2500 barton
Thermaltake cpu cooler
Soyo Kt600 dragon ultra platinum motherboard
Radeon 9800 XT
512 mb of 333mhz Crucial
Aspire dreamer case with its horribly generic 350watt ps
I run windows off of a 60 gig maxtor and when Im feeling adventerous I run debian off of the 80 gig western digital.
*a problem*
It isn't uncommon for me to leave my computer for maybe 6 hours, and come back to see that there is no video signal at all
A few months ago I decided that I would get really adventerous and that it was my place in life to tinker around with hardware. SO i took the standard heatsink off of my MSI ATi 9800 XT and put an even bigger one on. Hehheh, its huge and looks AWESOME. Now days I'm fairly used to getting video artifacts in hl2 :/ Halflife 2, half life 2 mods, and counter strike are about the only games I play. I'm poor I guess.
Later this year just recently I decided that the best way to get better load times in hl2 is to have more ram. SO I went out and bought 512 mb of 400mhz Kingston Ram. I'm aware that the two sticks aren't the same speed but I'm also aware that this shouldn't give most decent motherboards too much of a hard time. After i put the new stick in and windows booted perfectly I assumed that the mobo was doing what it should be doing: downlocking the 400mhz stick to 333mhz. Hl2 ran -great-. My philosophy: you can't really have too much ram.
A few weeks go by and I decide that I have a lot of minor software issues. Most of which are my fault for trying to tweak windows and have a perfect dual booting nix/windows machine. I decided that it had been over a year and reinstalling windows wasn't such a bad idea. So I do just that.
Before I had used windows service pack 1. The cd that I installed from was windows service pack 2. I guess it shouldn't make that big of a difference.
*the problem*
But after I installed windows and got all my necessary software that i Could think of it hasn't been anything but even more unstable. It seems to run fine for web/browsing etc and doesn't act up at all. But as soon as I run anything hl2 it gets bad. The game will run for maybe 15 minutes before it locks up. The whole machine seems to freeze and ctrl alt delete doesn't get me anywhere. SO I have to restart it. I go back to playing counter strike source or what ever and then it might run for maybe 7 minutes before it does the exact same thing.
A friend suggested that maybe I try running another hardware intensive game to see what happens. Well I'm poor so I thought I would just go download the farcry demo and see how it runs. I used to run farcry perfectly well a few months ago before I took it off my machine but now I can't even extract the game from the zip folder that i downloaded. If I do that explorer will lock upand I have to use ctrl alt delete to kill it.
That is just about everything I can think of for this. Im going to go meditate for a while and brood over my system issues.
Any concern is appreciated.
I built this as my first computer with the help of my friend about a year ago.
*skip through this just to hear the problem*
2500 barton
Thermaltake cpu cooler
Soyo Kt600 dragon ultra platinum motherboard
Radeon 9800 XT
512 mb of 333mhz Crucial
Aspire dreamer case with its horribly generic 350watt ps
I run windows off of a 60 gig maxtor and when Im feeling adventerous I run debian off of the 80 gig western digital.
*a problem*
It isn't uncommon for me to leave my computer for maybe 6 hours, and come back to see that there is no video signal at all
A few months ago I decided that I would get really adventerous and that it was my place in life to tinker around with hardware. SO i took the standard heatsink off of my MSI ATi 9800 XT and put an even bigger one on. Hehheh, its huge and looks AWESOME. Now days I'm fairly used to getting video artifacts in hl2 :/ Halflife 2, half life 2 mods, and counter strike are about the only games I play. I'm poor I guess.
Later this year just recently I decided that the best way to get better load times in hl2 is to have more ram. SO I went out and bought 512 mb of 400mhz Kingston Ram. I'm aware that the two sticks aren't the same speed but I'm also aware that this shouldn't give most decent motherboards too much of a hard time. After i put the new stick in and windows booted perfectly I assumed that the mobo was doing what it should be doing: downlocking the 400mhz stick to 333mhz. Hl2 ran -great-. My philosophy: you can't really have too much ram.
A few weeks go by and I decide that I have a lot of minor software issues. Most of which are my fault for trying to tweak windows and have a perfect dual booting nix/windows machine. I decided that it had been over a year and reinstalling windows wasn't such a bad idea. So I do just that.
Before I had used windows service pack 1. The cd that I installed from was windows service pack 2. I guess it shouldn't make that big of a difference.
*the problem*
But after I installed windows and got all my necessary software that i Could think of it hasn't been anything but even more unstable. It seems to run fine for web/browsing etc and doesn't act up at all. But as soon as I run anything hl2 it gets bad. The game will run for maybe 15 minutes before it locks up. The whole machine seems to freeze and ctrl alt delete doesn't get me anywhere. SO I have to restart it. I go back to playing counter strike source or what ever and then it might run for maybe 7 minutes before it does the exact same thing.
A friend suggested that maybe I try running another hardware intensive game to see what happens. Well I'm poor so I thought I would just go download the farcry demo and see how it runs. I used to run farcry perfectly well a few months ago before I took it off my machine but now I can't even extract the game from the zip folder that i downloaded. If I do that explorer will lock upand I have to use ctrl alt delete to kill it.
That is just about everything I can think of for this. Im going to go meditate for a while and brood over my system issues.
Any concern is appreciated.