aargh!!!!!
well she backed everything up...
so i transferred all the HD's and components over to the new Asus A8N-E
and did an XP repair installation...
it worked fine...but i needed to install the mobo drivers
from the supplied CD...
well upon reboot the entire system crashed...
so now i have to sort out the driver issues...
for now i'm thinking of booting to safe mode
and doing a system restore and letting her use the machine
as it is until i can get the driver issues sorted out...
it's only been 90 minutes and she's already anxious to start using the
machine!!!!
Ive been having tons of PC problems and am RMAing my motherboard.
Anyway one thing I noticed --- i was moving my hard disk for my 939
socket main system around and other HDs on my other system to the 939
to see if the problem Im having was the HD or WIN XP install.
I was surprised to see that the other systems wouldnt work at all with
the HDs since they had drivers etc installed for some other system. I
couldnt even get into safe mode with them. I abandoned that idea since
it was more work that it was worth.
However I did get my X2 last night too by coincidence. I sold my other
CPU already so I had to rush taking it out and putting my X2 in which
ncessitated another bios flash ------- super scary. The reason for the
hairyness was because when my 939 socket Chaintech started going down
in flames after I tried RAIDING it I tried to flash the bios to the
latest which adds X2 support among other things and it mysteriously
just died. At the time of course I thought it might improve RAID
performance didnt care about X2 support. Anyway it was reflashed by
someone but with the older bios.
Last night everything went right though. I flashed the latest bios
with a newer WINFLASH 1.7 vs the 1.51 which is linked to many sites
and there was no problem. Then I plopped in my X2 and it was up and
running.
My mother motherboard is still flakey though so I RMAd it and will
send it out this week probably so my x2 will be sitting around for a
few weeks after I take it out of this system Im using right now.
I have a backup AMD 64 so no big deal.
Actually its funny I dont notice much of a difference at all yet but
then Ive only used it for web surfing and file explorer. I was reading
some reviews at NEWEGG last night and they were so high on it talking
about how immediately powerful it felt , awesome that I expected some
super duper effect right away though I had expected pretty much what
Im experiencing now before I read the Newegg reviews. Obviously its
only going to come into play with certain situations. I also havent
even tried OCing at all.
My motherboard sucks though. I have so many parts I can swap almost
everything out with another except the PCI express ATI 800XL dont have
two PCI express graphics cards.
My chaintech which was 100% stable for almost a year melted down
bigtime with raid totally trashing my data. Then I reinstalled the old
way but thought maybe the cooling was marginal on the nforce4
motherboard chip which showed up with RAID. I then upgraded the
motherboard passive cooling with an official active upgrade cooler
from Chaintech which they use now on the newer version of the board.
It got WORSE. Now its totally quirky undependable.
I remounted the active fan setup on the nforce chip 5 TIMES ! It was
so bad that it was crashing , rebooting at random and locking up. Each
time I remounted the fan/hs it got better.
Two nights ago playing FAR CRY it melted down again getting worse and
worse and worse locking up finally every 20 min and crashing.
I give up cant imagine how I can remount the active cooler better. Its
got to be that though as all the problems happened after that and it
gets a bit better or worse when I mess with it.
Though Im wondering if there are TWO problems like another one with
the ATI 800XL which was very hot after FAR CRY. Was that contributing
to the crashes? It was working fine before with FEAR a few months ago
and Quake 4 though there was that weirdness with a few scenes being
messed up.
Everything seems tied to the nforce4 chip though and overheating
though its not reflected in the temps which always stay in a narrow
range. Ive tested memory over and over and over , hard disks ---- they
always seem to be getting corrupted too but no way can ALL 6 of my
hard disks be bad. Checked it with 3 power supplies and two different
CPUs the 3000 939 and X2 3800.
Ive had that happen with 3 motherboards in the past where after about
a year they seem to flake out though this one seems connected with the
nforce4 chip cooling.
