![[H]ard|Forum](/styles/hardforum/xenforo/logo_dark.png){kind=logo}
Okay, so recently I've been having some major computer problems. I have to give you guys a little background..so this might be a little read. Here's my hardware specs:
Antec 450W PSU
Asus P4P800 Deluxe with intel 3.0c processor
4x 512MB DDR433 Mushkin level one RAM (2 bought a year ago, 2 bought a few weeks ago)
Radeon 9800 PRO
SB Audigy
ATI HDTV Wonder (removed)
2x SATA 10k RPM 36gb Raptors in Raid 0 (windows drive)
PRI IDE: WD 8mb 250gb, WD 8mb 120GB
SEC IDE: Optorite dd0401 DVDRW, Random DVD-Rom
VIA RAID: Seagate 200gb, Hitachi 250gb
USB: Lacie 160GB external, mouse
About a week ago, I bought an ATI HDTV Wonder capture card. I installed it in my system, and everything was going great for a couple days. Then I noticed that when I restart, rundll32 seemed to hang..the cpu usage would be at about 50% consistently and I had to manually kill it. I traced this problem to be related to ATI's Remote Wonder software. A couple google searches told me that ATI's remote wonder software is quite buggy and does have a lot of compatibility problems. I ended up doing a system restore to before I installed hte HDTV wonder, then reinstalled everything, and it seemed to be going fine. After that, I went to ATI's website and updated the HDTV wonder suite...the DTV decoder, the MMC, etc, the whole works. Upon completing this, I noticed that suddenly none of the capture card features were working. Running DTV or Analog TV resulted in "no signal". I looked online for related problems, but couldn't find anything. I then used ATI's uninstall utility to roll back to the previous version. However, after rolling back, I was getting some language error with all the functions on the software - the TV wouldn't even run. So I figured must be some compatibility problem or something didn't get uninstalled correctly, no big deal. Did a system restore to before the install of the card and went back to reinstall it. However, upon reinstall I was getting the same language problem. At this point I was getting quite frustrated, but it was really only the capture card that was causing problems. I began to uninstall the capture card so I could physically remove it and try it in a different computer when the problems started happening.
In the midst of the uninstall, I got a BSOD. I don't know what the message was since at the time it was set to automatically restart on BSOD. At this point I thought it was some conflict with the capture card, so I powered down, physically removed the card, and got back into Windows. I then proceeded to remove all the ATI HDTV related capture card software. During this process, I got another BSOD. At this point I still thought it was some sort of Windows configuration issue, so I figured a system restore back to before hte card was installed should fix it. Went through the system restore, and after restoring, I got another BSOD. Now I was starting to get nervous. I was afraid I might have to reformat, so I began to back up data onto my other drives. However, during this process I was consistently getting BSODs, sometimes in the middle of a copy, sometimes before. After one of these BSODs, when I started up the computer, I got a BIOS checksum error, and was forced to use the cd to reload the bios. However, it went in a loop. BIOS Checksum error - reload bios from cd, turn off comp, turn it on, and bios checksum error again. I decided to call it a night and try again in the morning. In the morning, bios checksum errors were gone, and it was booting into windows again, albeit with BSODs. I was thinking I needed to reformat, but a google search on my friend's comp told me to check the BSOD error message first, as it might help with debugging. Once I disabled the auto restart, I found out that the BSOD error message was something along the lines of "PAGE FAULT IN NON PAGED AREA" or something like that, but not connected to any system file. Google told me that this is most likely a memory issue - I highly doubted that, but I figured I might as well run a memtest anyway. Ran memtest, went out of the room for about 10-15 minutes, came back and noticed that the monitor colors were all messed up..memtest is usually blue with red errors, my whole screen was blocks of primarily red and blue. At this point, I shut down the comp, took out 2 sticks of RAM and tested the other 2 (my old ones). It failed on the first pass. Tested the other 2 (new ones), and it passed 2 tests. So I figured something was wrong with 1 of the 2 original sticks of ram. I systematically ran memtest with the 2 "good" sticks, and the other 2 sticks individually, both failed. I then tried those 2 sticks individually with the good sticks in the other memory slot, and they still failed. I then ran the 2 "good" sticks under memtest again, and it also failed.
I also noticed that the memory was getting extremely hot. I don't know if this is because of memtest, but my ram has never gotten that hot before (I am always checking since my case is open). I also noticed that my PSU fan was only spinning at about 1200 rpm (in the bios fan speed shows up as red). However, I seem to remember my psu fan always being pretty slow, so I didn't think much of it. I decided to see if my comp was stable with the 1gb of ram that first passed memtest. I needed to use my comp for hw, so I didn't have time for more debugging. Started up, and sure enough no BSOD. The ram was also running much cooler, and windows was running with no problems. This was saturday night/sunday morning. The computer was running fine (and 24/7) until last night, when I noticed it had frozen in the middle of the night. I turned it off, and started it back up, and everything seemed to be fine..until it froze about 25 minutes later. Turned it off again and put my other sticks of ram in, thought it might be a ram issue and previous memtest failures were because of overheating (the hdtv card generates a LOT of heat), but now the computer wouldn't even POST. Took out the 2 old sticks of ram, still no POST. Sometimes ( and this happened a few times in the past few days I just can't remember exactly when) the computer will start up, but nothing will happen, no video nothing, just spinning fans. I turn off the computer and usually unplugging the power cord completely for a few seconds and plugging it back in gets it to attempt to POST. So, I did this, got a bios checksum error, reloaded bios and started up. Still nada, so I reset CMOS by taking out the battery and moving the reset jumper. After this, it started up..but when I entered the bios to change settings it froze after a min or two. Restarted again, once again got into bios (after a few more of those no video powerups), and once again it froze, but this time after less time. On the next successful reboot, it froze even before entering the bios, and now, it will not boot no matter what I do.
Unfortunately I'm in my apartment, so it's hard to test my parts. All my parts are quality, so I don't know which direction I should be looking for a failure. I'm going to try to put the ram in a friends comp later and memtest it, but I have a feeling its either the mobo or the psu.
I was wondering if you guys had any suggestions. I even tried starting it up with most devices unplugged in case it was a psu issue, but no go. I'm really lost on what to do.
Also, it should be noted that my comp is running pretty much 24/7. I can't remember a single freeze or lockup up to the point I installed the HDTV card, and my comp has been running with these devices for about a year (latest addition was 1gb of ram about 2-3 weeks ago, but its been stable since then)
So, for all you who actually read that, thanks, and if you have any suggestions I'd really appreciate it. I need some wya to systematically test devices in my system or something, so I can isolate the problem. It has to be a hardware issue I think, since all these problems occur before booting the OS. I also don't know if this hw issue was always there, or if it popped up as a result of heat or the hdtv card or something.
Thanks again,
Kevin
Antec 450W PSU
Asus P4P800 Deluxe with intel 3.0c processor
4x 512MB DDR433 Mushkin level one RAM (2 bought a year ago, 2 bought a few weeks ago)
Radeon 9800 PRO
SB Audigy
ATI HDTV Wonder (removed)
2x SATA 10k RPM 36gb Raptors in Raid 0 (windows drive)
PRI IDE: WD 8mb 250gb, WD 8mb 120GB
SEC IDE: Optorite dd0401 DVDRW, Random DVD-Rom
VIA RAID: Seagate 200gb, Hitachi 250gb
USB: Lacie 160GB external, mouse
About a week ago, I bought an ATI HDTV Wonder capture card. I installed it in my system, and everything was going great for a couple days. Then I noticed that when I restart, rundll32 seemed to hang..the cpu usage would be at about 50% consistently and I had to manually kill it. I traced this problem to be related to ATI's Remote Wonder software. A couple google searches told me that ATI's remote wonder software is quite buggy and does have a lot of compatibility problems. I ended up doing a system restore to before I installed hte HDTV wonder, then reinstalled everything, and it seemed to be going fine. After that, I went to ATI's website and updated the HDTV wonder suite...the DTV decoder, the MMC, etc, the whole works. Upon completing this, I noticed that suddenly none of the capture card features were working. Running DTV or Analog TV resulted in "no signal". I looked online for related problems, but couldn't find anything. I then used ATI's uninstall utility to roll back to the previous version. However, after rolling back, I was getting some language error with all the functions on the software - the TV wouldn't even run. So I figured must be some compatibility problem or something didn't get uninstalled correctly, no big deal. Did a system restore to before the install of the card and went back to reinstall it. However, upon reinstall I was getting the same language problem. At this point I was getting quite frustrated, but it was really only the capture card that was causing problems. I began to uninstall the capture card so I could physically remove it and try it in a different computer when the problems started happening.
In the midst of the uninstall, I got a BSOD. I don't know what the message was since at the time it was set to automatically restart on BSOD. At this point I thought it was some conflict with the capture card, so I powered down, physically removed the card, and got back into Windows. I then proceeded to remove all the ATI HDTV related capture card software. During this process, I got another BSOD. At this point I still thought it was some sort of Windows configuration issue, so I figured a system restore back to before hte card was installed should fix it. Went through the system restore, and after restoring, I got another BSOD. Now I was starting to get nervous. I was afraid I might have to reformat, so I began to back up data onto my other drives. However, during this process I was consistently getting BSODs, sometimes in the middle of a copy, sometimes before. After one of these BSODs, when I started up the computer, I got a BIOS checksum error, and was forced to use the cd to reload the bios. However, it went in a loop. BIOS Checksum error - reload bios from cd, turn off comp, turn it on, and bios checksum error again. I decided to call it a night and try again in the morning. In the morning, bios checksum errors were gone, and it was booting into windows again, albeit with BSODs. I was thinking I needed to reformat, but a google search on my friend's comp told me to check the BSOD error message first, as it might help with debugging. Once I disabled the auto restart, I found out that the BSOD error message was something along the lines of "PAGE FAULT IN NON PAGED AREA" or something like that, but not connected to any system file. Google told me that this is most likely a memory issue - I highly doubted that, but I figured I might as well run a memtest anyway. Ran memtest, went out of the room for about 10-15 minutes, came back and noticed that the monitor colors were all messed up..memtest is usually blue with red errors, my whole screen was blocks of primarily red and blue. At this point, I shut down the comp, took out 2 sticks of RAM and tested the other 2 (my old ones). It failed on the first pass. Tested the other 2 (new ones), and it passed 2 tests. So I figured something was wrong with 1 of the 2 original sticks of ram. I systematically ran memtest with the 2 "good" sticks, and the other 2 sticks individually, both failed. I then tried those 2 sticks individually with the good sticks in the other memory slot, and they still failed. I then ran the 2 "good" sticks under memtest again, and it also failed.
I also noticed that the memory was getting extremely hot. I don't know if this is because of memtest, but my ram has never gotten that hot before (I am always checking since my case is open). I also noticed that my PSU fan was only spinning at about 1200 rpm (in the bios fan speed shows up as red). However, I seem to remember my psu fan always being pretty slow, so I didn't think much of it. I decided to see if my comp was stable with the 1gb of ram that first passed memtest. I needed to use my comp for hw, so I didn't have time for more debugging. Started up, and sure enough no BSOD. The ram was also running much cooler, and windows was running with no problems. This was saturday night/sunday morning. The computer was running fine (and 24/7) until last night, when I noticed it had frozen in the middle of the night. I turned it off, and started it back up, and everything seemed to be fine..until it froze about 25 minutes later. Turned it off again and put my other sticks of ram in, thought it might be a ram issue and previous memtest failures were because of overheating (the hdtv card generates a LOT of heat), but now the computer wouldn't even POST. Took out the 2 old sticks of ram, still no POST. Sometimes ( and this happened a few times in the past few days I just can't remember exactly when) the computer will start up, but nothing will happen, no video nothing, just spinning fans. I turn off the computer and usually unplugging the power cord completely for a few seconds and plugging it back in gets it to attempt to POST. So, I did this, got a bios checksum error, reloaded bios and started up. Still nada, so I reset CMOS by taking out the battery and moving the reset jumper. After this, it started up..but when I entered the bios to change settings it froze after a min or two. Restarted again, once again got into bios (after a few more of those no video powerups), and once again it froze, but this time after less time. On the next successful reboot, it froze even before entering the bios, and now, it will not boot no matter what I do.
Unfortunately I'm in my apartment, so it's hard to test my parts. All my parts are quality, so I don't know which direction I should be looking for a failure. I'm going to try to put the ram in a friends comp later and memtest it, but I have a feeling its either the mobo or the psu.
I was wondering if you guys had any suggestions. I even tried starting it up with most devices unplugged in case it was a psu issue, but no go. I'm really lost on what to do.
Also, it should be noted that my comp is running pretty much 24/7. I can't remember a single freeze or lockup up to the point I installed the HDTV card, and my comp has been running with these devices for about a year (latest addition was 1gb of ram about 2-3 weeks ago, but its been stable since then)
So, for all you who actually read that, thanks, and if you have any suggestions I'd really appreciate it. I need some wya to systematically test devices in my system or something, so I can isolate the problem. It has to be a hardware issue I think, since all these problems occur before booting the OS. I also don't know if this hw issue was always there, or if it popped up as a result of heat or the hdtv card or something.
Thanks again,
Kevin
