What could be causing this problem?

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wernehawen

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Apr 26, 2006
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Hi, I am not sure where to place this topic but since mine is an AMD pc, thought i would try here first.

I would appreciate anyone who could give me some input as to what is causing this problem.

I have an AMD pc which is about nearly 5 yrs now i think, has always been very stable. The problem started last week.

First it said i have a floppy disk error on the post screen and then below it appeared a checksum error. Din think much bout it as dun have a floppy disk anymore, booted into windows (It's a new XP service pack 2 installation, previously was using SP1. SP2 was working fine for about a month until this problem appeared), first thing i noticed was that nowadays my windows clock seems not to be updating itself when the pc is switched off however in the BIOS, it displays the time correctly. I would then get a lot of softwares to crash in the midst of using them....and most of the time, the my pc would restart itself automatically....occasionally i would get a BSOD error and i noticed too that my BIOS resets itself to it's default setting, how often i have no idea.......

so can anyone pls help me out here.....I would greatly appreciate any suggestions to help me solve this problem. I was thinking could it be the CMOS battery becoming weak and causing these problems or would it most probably be a more serious hardware failure issue?
 
It does sound like the CMOS battery needs replacing so I'd do that first.
They are normally a CR2032 cell.

If any problems persist afterwards we can troubleshoot.
 
I would try getting a new cmos battery, and see if that helps. After you put that in your bios settings are gunna be all back to default, so i would suggest you go into it and edit them to your liking.
 
hi guys, jus bought a new CR2032 battery for my mobo. Installed it, configured my bios and when i restarted windows, my pc shuts itself down almost immediately after using it for a few mintues. Programmes run but it either hangs and a window appear stating that the software has encountered and error and has to shut down or the computer restarts.

Anyone might be able shed some light as to what might be causing this? could it be corrupt memory causing these errors? i've got 3 banks of 512mb ddr moemory installed....
 
Possibly heat, PSU failure or another device faulty thats drawing too much power.
Any component could be dying like CPU, motherboard, Ram, gfx card...



Try to reduce the load on the PSU by unplugging everything not needed to use the PC.
That means all extra drives, USB devices, memory etc etc.
If things improve, either the PSU cant cope with the load of everything plugged in or one of the items you unplugged is faulty.

If you can swap bits out from another PC that would help.
If you can try a more powerful PSU we can eliminate PSU issues.
Try using 1 ram stick in different slots.

If none of the above works, try declocking everything a bit.
If that works, you either have a heat issue or something can no longer run at its rated specs.

Report back any temps you can at load (if possible) and idle.
 
well it seems 1 stick of my memory is corrupted. I removed 2 sticks of ram to see if my pc works fine and well, the problem seemed to disappear. Put more stick back in and only once did firefox close on me and after that all programmes including firefox worked fine for the whole night.

Will check tonite to c if my other stick of ram's the culprit....thanks tho guys
 
well guys, i guess we can pretty much say that the one stick of ram is the culprit for the problems i encountered as after putting that stick back in to replace another stick, the problem came back....replaced the bad stick of ram and the problem went away....so thank god that i can continue my work now.

However y wud a faulty stick of ram cause my OS's clock to go awol? Is a weak CMOS battery partly to blame there too?

And thanks a lot for everyone who helped me, esp Nenu...appreciated your help dude
 
Yeah the CMOS battery is most likely the cause of time going nutso, it provides power for the Real Time Clock when the machine isnt powered up.
Happy to help :)
 
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