Computer problem - tired of bangin' my head on this

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Michelle Widell

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There are just some times that I find myself in over my head on what should be something simple... (I really hate fixing people's home PC's, btw..)



I have a client whose son had an old P3 that they wanted me to switch out with an unused P4 from their office. They took the P4 to their son's house, and I went there to look at his P3 to see if it was "worth saving", or if time was better spent moving his apps and docs over to the P4.



I decided to not waste time on the P3 and setup the P4 for him. Both systems had Windows 98 SE. P4 has 256mb of RAM.



The P4's CD-ROM drive didn't work, so I took his DVD reader and CD-R/W from his P3 and stuck it in the P4. The CD drives are on the same cable and are cabled correctly ("cable select" on both drives, and both drives read fine.) I took the P3's hard drive out and put it in the P4 to transfer his needed info over, no problem. (Again, same cable as the original hard drive, both are "cable select")



No other changes made to the P4. First, the modem seemed to not work properly - said "hardware error", so I took the modem out of their P3, installed the drivers, and was able to get online with no issue.



I left and everyone was happy.. for a short period of time.



Client called and said that they are continually getting BSOD's, etc. I took the P4 home and restored the system with the restore disks from Gateway. Hooked it up to my network and downloaded all the patches, etc. Installed their dialup software (SBCglobal - they don't have fast Internet available where they are), and tested the dialup. I'd type in their password, click connect, and the app seemed to freeze for about 60 seconds before it would finally dial and successfully connect. I setup a dial-up networking connection to a local ISP, and had no issues. I was never able to remedy the "slow" SBCGlobal software. I tried installing the software from the SBC disk, and also downloaded it from their website - worked the same.



The other problem with "slowness" exists when he plays a game that has sound. The system "hiccups" and acts like it's a 286 that just isn't fast enough to run a simple game. (Chuzzle, btw.) Any game he'd run with sound acted this way. The software is installed on the hard drive and doesn't run off the CD.



I'm thinking perhaps the system board is fugged up - who knows. Hardware issues are so hard to track down. I've checked for IRQ conflicts, running apps that shouldn't be there, etc., and everything is fine.



Anyone have any ideas? I've wasted alot of non-billable time on this piece of &%@.



Michelle

 
Michelle,



The frist thing I would do is add more memory, 256 is really nor sufficient, bump it toat least 512 meg,it is probably doing a lot of disk swapping for lack of memory.
 
First problem = P4.

Fix = AMD 64 :cool:

......



anyways



:)



Slowness......dunno. I would usually attribute that to spyware, or excessive apps running in the background. But if you just restored from a system disk, that shouldn't be an issue.



Did you check the heatsink on the P4 chip? P4s run hot as hell....if the heatsink is all filled up with dust or the fan isn't running, the chip will begin to thermal throttle, generate errors, and eventually BSOD....



Another thing, I try not to run CS mode. In fact, I never do.... Some motherboards just don't handle it right. I always set the drive at the end of the cable to Master, and the one in the middle of the cable to slave. This cures many many many many drive conflicts, and file transfer IO errors....



Check to see if the RAM is bad. run memtest (www.memtestx86.org) and see if the RAM is stickin' it to ya.



Another thought..what is the hard drive brand? Western digital drives like to be left jumperless if they are the only drive on the cable. If they are "alone" pull all jumpers from the back of the drive. Only run jumpers if there are other drives on that same cable.



If your CPU is cool, your RAM is OK, your drives are in Master/slave mode, and you are still having BSOD and "slowness" then consider a board...but CPUs, RAM and everything else almost always goes before motherboards...just the nature of the beast.....



Best of luck. I know how this $h!t goes.....trust me......



cheers,
 
Sounds like MB problems to me. Does the board have integrated graphics that share the system RAM?
 
It only happens when you open apps that use the audio hdw?

If you have on-board audio, it might be conflicting with the audio hdw on the modem.. (IIRC most if not all modems have audio board capabilities), I haven't used a modem for some time now.



Perhaps, just as a test, remove the modem and try the apps?

Put the modem on another PCI slot?

my 2 cts

 
Michelle: sounds like you've done everything I would have done to get the BSOD's to stop. At this point you'd have to start swapping parts until you fix it. I'd start with memory. Pull out the 256mb chip(s) and replace with known good memory. If that don't work, next step would be *gulp* a new motherboard.



Since we're talking about an older P4 system, you have to draw the line at some point and say it would be cheaper to go pickup a new $500 Dell machine and toss the old one.



And Win98SE could be really buggy on some hardware. Win XP would run on a 256mb P4, not very fast, but it would run... and would be a lot more stable.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Ditto on Andy's suggestion to manually set the drives instead of using cable select, and Darin's to upgrade to WinXP. And not just because XP is more stable - XP will also allow for PCI bus mastering, which shares IRQs across the PCI bus more efficiently and effectively than just the BIOS alone. You also need to make sure that the drivers for the motherboard chipset are installed.



You didn't say, but if the video card is AGP, I'd also make sure the PCI slot directly below the video card was not used for anything.
 
Michelle: The slowness sounds like a conflict-IRQ or a driver would be my first guess. As above, I don't like using the drive select, but suggest using the jumpers to manually config.



The memory at 256MB is fine for a Win98 machine, and you should not be seeing that slowness. Something is not compatible.



Even thought it doesn't work, if you install the old CD drive, does it change anything? Also, what if you run the machine with no CD, same modem problems?
 
The sound card, video card, modem, etc., are all separate cards and are not built in to the motherboard. I believe the video is PCI.



Windows 98 really doesn't do any better with anything over 128mb of RAM, so 256mb is more than sufficient. (That's the way they bought it - I wanted to throw XP on it, but they don't want to spend the money.. I may still convince them.)



I'm thinking that it's an IRQ problem.. but it's just plain weird. The modem is from the old computer (Gateway proprietary - I used the correct drivers and it works fine as long as I use dial-up networking and not the SBCglobal software.



It doesn't BSOD since I reinstalled Windows. My client said that it acted funny (the slowness) before I reinstalled windows and after. I solved SOMETHING at least (no BSOD).



I'll try changing to master/slave (I didn't change any of the jumpers on the CD/DVD drives from how they were in the old computer, nor did I change the jumpers on the hard drives.. they were already CS. I did remove the second hard drive as a "test" - no change.)



I'll try some of Andy's suggestions, and also to remove that modem.



 

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