Computer woes.

[Oblivion]

I put a computer together about a year or two ago, the first one I decided to attempt..and unfortunately have had a long list of issues with it so far. First, I bought about half the parts new, got about half from a friend who was deciding to build one and then decided not to.

nVidia 570 SLI Intel edition.
Intel Core2 Duo, E6750
The RAM I have escapes me at the moment, I want to say kingston dual channel, two sticks, gig each, the clock speed I can't really recall right now.
Windows XP.
GeForce 9500 GT.


The first problem I had was with Vista, I bought it, but it just didn't agree with the mobo. Claims to be compatible with Vista, yet it refused to recognize my on-board sound card, USB headset or network card. No amount of driver downloads seemed to matter. I settled for buying a separate network card, which worked. Sound never did, which eventually drove me nuts(and back to XP).

Two problems with XP cropped up fairly instantly. It wouldn't boot with all four sticks of RAM in, just go straight to blue-screen. I swapped them all out to memory test them and got no errors from any of them. At random intervals, my headset will go nuts. I'll be fine, talking to guildies on second, a second later I open my mic to speak and people are screaming to make it stop. It does happen completely randomly, I've tried uninstalling vent, I've tried drivers, I've bought three different headsets. All do it. When I plug a headset into the SRT standard plugs, it works fine. What causes it? I can't really say.

Second problem was a faulty PSU, bought cheap and got what I paid for. Mistake that won't happen again.

The third problem I've had is recent. My computer will hang, performance will slow. Firefox will take a minute to open(literally), booting up at times, took five minutes. The hard drive light would be at a constant on and eventually, itl'l just lock. After researching a bit online, I decided to check my SATA cables(SATA hard drive, Seagate 500gig). Opened her up, cords weren't loose. Decided to swap from one the SATA cable on the motherboard to a second SATA slot I had open. It..solved the problem.

However, that was about a month ago, maybe two months. And now it's starting to do the same thing. Once a week, I'll camp, or hearth and I'll get a bluescreen instead of a loading screen. It's taking progressively longer to boot, it hangs for short periods, takes thirty seconds to open firefox and in-game, performance has dropped drastically. From 25-30 DPS in Dalaran to 11-18. Earlier tonight, I rolled out of SMC on my bike to go do some festival fire hunting..and hitched up with stop-and-go lag for about five minutes. Right outside SMC, no PC's nearby, nothing that should have stressed the system at all. Finally, I've run multiple virus/spyware scans, all of which come up clean.

Temp readings are all within acceptable levels, nothing is overclocked. I am..completely and utterly at a loss. My gut feeling tells me to replace the motherboard. But a nagging voice in the back of my head is telling me that maaaaybe there's something wrong with the hard drive, or CPU itself. I'm out of ideas, out of ways I can think of to try to diagnose this. Anyone with some superior knowledge perhaps have any ideas of what may be the root of the problems here?

[LogisticSaucer]

problems with vista

Is your BIOS up to date? Always ensure you are running the most up to date BIOS. This is generally more important for those who overclock or tweak, but can also affect compatability / functionality.

speed problems

I see a few possible problems here. Your memory could be toast. This would certainly lead to decreased response time, although I find it odd that it doesn't do it ALL the time. Download a free memory check utility and run it. See what comes up.

I'm not familiar with your motherboard but many employ a downclocking feature which cuts your multi in half when it determines you dont need the speed. It may be doing this inappropriately. I'd recommend installing CPU-Z (freeware) and running it while you run WoW. Ensure that in CPU-Z your clock speed remains at its rated speed.

If you'd like to really test your CPU out and see if its causing you issues, get yourself Prime95 (freeware). Prime95 is basically going to run your setup through the wringer. If there is a flaw with your system, a P95 test will expose it. When (and if) P95 finds a flaw, your system will BSOD. Take careful note of the BSOD error # and post it here so I can help you out.

Another final suggestion, while you're running P95, run RealTemp (freeware) which will monitor GPU, system, CPU, and individual core temperatures so we can make sure you're still within tolerance.

[Oblivion]

All sound beautiful. My bios is up to date, I've already run my memory sticks through a program called memtest86 and everything showed green on all four. I changed them out over the course of a two week period, one at a time to rotate them all in and see if one was causing an issue. They all work fine(and all showed green as mentioned on the test), but when all four are put in, it refuses to boot to windows.

As for everything else, I'll grab those programs and see if anything glaring shows up. Appreciate all the suggestions.

Edit: After running CPU-Z with WoW, I do notice that it's tending to dip from the 2133 speed to 1600 back and forth with the multi dropping from 8 to 6. I can't really link it to the speed, as I didn't necessarily notice extra lag in-game when it dropped(only in Org, though). I did load into the game extremely slow, however, and nearly the entire time it was locked at 1600.

[Ryoku]

One thing that I had already with several different mainboards was a problem concerning interrupts.
Just like yours the computers were doing fine for a while and suddently the performance droppend and I had a constant 100% cpu usage eventhough the task managers processes together didnt show 100%. What I advise you to do is to get process explorer (dont remeber the name of the company but it was baught by microsoft). Its freeware so no worries about any costs.

In ther check the cpu usage and pay special attention to interrupts, they took up 60% of my cpu usage. I did solve the problem by kicking out my ide and sata controllers (under the device manager). Restart and the problem was solved.

One other possible problem might be your virus scanner. If you happen to have mcafee they did bring out 2 faulty updates which somehow deleted important windows files. Check out your quarantine.

Hope to have been able to help a little

Greetz
Ryoku

[Tanksforus]

Blue screen and lockups is usually caused by memory or insuffecient power.
I would recommend reinstalling xp with only 2 memory sticks, that mainboard hates 4 sticks of ram, try the bios update might fix the mainboard memory problem.

Do a harddrive diagnostic scan with the appropiate hardware vendors tool. It sounds as it is on its way out, slowing down

Make sure your graphics card fan is free of dust, if its a fanless model make sure your case have adequete ventalation, fan in front to suck in fan at back to suck out.

[Oblivion]

Yeah, the thing that's odd about the lockups/slowdowns is that they completely stopped for about a month when I switched the SATA cable from my hard drive to another spot on the mobo.

I did a bios update and it didn't change anything, I can't even use four sticks of RAM because XP simply won't boot if I try to put all four in. Any combination of the four works so long as I only use two, though. I'll run another memory test in case I missed one.

As for fans, I've checked and they're all working fine and are clear of dust. Both case fans, the GPU fan and the CPU fan.

I got Process Explorer as well, it didn't seem like my CPU usage was overly high there. But then, the computer hasn't gotten to the point again to where it was at a month ago with the slowdowns just completely crippling the system.

I'll head to seagate and see about getting the diagnostic for the HDD as well. Not knowing what's causing these things are just driving me nuts, so I appreciate all the help I'm getting here. <3

[LogisticSaucer]

Hmm, another question. As you FIRST START WINDOWS, and all your startup appas have loaded, but before YOU load anything else, whats your memory usage?

Find this by CTRL-ALT-DEL and click the performance tab.

[Oblivion]

About 500-550 megs out of the 2gigs I have is in use after all startup apps have been loaded.

[Oblivion]

Another small update, managed to have the performance tab running during one of the hang periods.

CPU Usage was between 3-15%(and was largely stable in the low end with only the occasional spike to 10+).
Page File Usage(if it matters) was at about 600megs.
Physical Memory was at about 1.3 gigs available out of 2.

The entire time, the HDD light was full on and I could faintly hear it grinding away.

In all, it lasted about five minutes and happened when I tried to open Firefox.
For reference sake, it's also happened when using IE as well as Chrome.

[Rak]

If you open Process Explorer and press control+I you can see a graph of I/O history. You may be able to hover on the graph and see what is making your harddrive thrash. If it says something like "svchost" take note of the number after the name (like "svchost:700"). The number is the process ID.

You should have a column in the process list called Process ID or PID, if not enable it by right clicking on the top of the columns where you can sort them and select it in there. Then you can match the number to the process that is causing the hard drive thrashing.

If it is a svchost or Run32.dll or etc process, hover your mouse over it and it should tell you what threads are running in that process. If you find any info from this post it here.

Also, the blue screens could be unrelated to the hard disk usage which is probably slowing your system. I would suggest changing your video card drivers, preferably roll back to an older version (as the newest nvidia drivers were crashing my system every hour or so).

If you roll them back, go download an older version from nvidia's site and google around and make sure you don't see many people reporting lock ups or crashes with the version. Download "Driver Sweeper".

Then go into add/remove programs in control panel (I forgot where it's located in XP now), and you should be able to remove Nvidia Display Drivers. ONLY remove the DISPLAY drivers.

After that, reboot into safe mode (press f8 several times after your system beeps once while booting but before it boots all the way until you get the option to boot into safe mode). Run Driver Sweeper in safe mode and make sure only Nvidia Display Drivers is checked, nothing else. I believe you then click an Analyze button. It will make a list of the driver files, click Clean to delete them. Reboot into normal Windows.

Install the new (or old!) drivers the standard way, then reboot a last time. This is how you should always roll back video drivers to ensure there aren't any conflicts.

[Oblivion]

Thanks Rak, I've got process explorer set up like so. Hopefully I'll be able to catch during one of the fits my HD tends to go into and post something substantial here.

[Oblivion]

Another small update. I decided to go ahead and sort of randomly put in the other two sticks of RAM I have. Dual channel, exact same as the other two, all have been memtested. I put the other two in, boot the system, it gets thorugh all the initial booting, before it starts loading windows, it tells me that windows is missing a system file or it's corrupted and to boot from the disk and repair, took out the two sticks and it boots normally. Friend of mine who was here at the time sort of make an off the cuff remark that it was trying to boot Windows directly from my RAM. After he said it, I thought I remembered hearing a problem like that before, but googling, I couldn't find it.

Anyone know what else might be producing this error when I try to put 4 dual channel(1 gig sticks) RAM in the system? Boots fine with any of the two.

[Ryoku]

Referring to post 9 I would simply say that windows is using ur hdd as ram (insufficient physical mem, at least it thinks so)

After reading over ur post 1 again, maybe ur PSU fried your mainboard and thats why u are having so many problems

[solocommand]

I would have to agree with Ryoku. IMO, it sounds like an issue with the motherboard, though the hard disc could be at fault as well. Windows XP 32-bit does not support over 3GB of ram as well, so I wouldn't bother trying to use all four sticks.

It almost sounds like it's missing part of the pagefile; though I haven't seen that specific error before. Almost all PCs will use some space on the hard disc as swap space, regardless of how much memory you have. Possibly, it was suspended/sleeped instead of fully shut down before swapping memory?

The nVidia board should still be under mfg warranty if you only bought it a year ago, I'd send it back for a replacement.

[Oblivion]

I built the computer a year ago, the board was something that a friend of mine ordered for himself when he was considering building a rig about six months prior and he just never did, so he gave me the mobo when I started mine.

My gut feeling has said it's a board issue because I had issues with it from the start(onboard network card not working, for instance), so if it is the mobo, it's probably been borked since before my PSU went. I'll see about checking the warranty on it, and worst case I've been looking at new boards recently to pick one up. My fear is that I'll get a new board, swap it in and still have these problems.