Strange problems cropping up in P4P800

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Greysky

The past few weeks have seen my computer suffer from some strange problems I
am hoping sounds familiar to someone here. I have a P4P800 Deluxe
motherboard I bought when they were just coming out, and it has worked
nicely all this time. First, I am having programs begin to screw up for no
reason - Go back malfunctioned, and tried to uninstall itself but only made
it part way - it took itself off my C drive, but says it is still on my D
drive and now refuses to uninstall. I hate to manually take it out because I
know it could totally destroy my OS and trash my C drive, so I can live with
it not working I guess. Today, I became aware my floppy drive is no longer
working. So, I boot to the BIOS screen, and on the first page that comes up,
it says it is disabled. Ok, so I try to scroll down the page to reactivate
it, when the BIOS screen freezes forcing me to boot again. It freezes every
time I attempt to scroll down or across a page - I am locked out of my bios
(it is v 1019)! The computer is also suddenly rebooting itself for no
reason - this doesn't happen too often, but it never happened more than 2
weeks ago. Other weird things are suddenly cropping up - for example,
yesterday I suddenly lost all my bookmarks in Firefox. They just disappeared
leaving me with an empty list. Does my motherboard sound like it's dying? Or
could it be the power supply maybe - its an Antec true control 550. Hope
someone has an idea what's happening because at this point my computer is
acting like its haunted by mischievous gremlins - which I guess is in
keeping with the season... I have a feeling I need to Ghost my hard drive
just in case.

Thanks for any ideas...
 
"Greysky" said:
The past few weeks have seen my computer suffer from some strange problems I
am hoping sounds familiar to someone here. I have a P4P800 Deluxe
motherboard I bought when they were just coming out, and it has worked
nicely all this time. First, I am having programs begin to screw up for no
reason - Go back malfunctioned, and tried to uninstall itself but only made
it part way - it took itself off my C drive, but says it is still on my D
drive and now refuses to uninstall. I hate to manually take it out because I
know it could totally destroy my OS and trash my C drive, so I can live with
it not working I guess. Today, I became aware my floppy drive is no longer
working. So, I boot to the BIOS screen, and on the first page that comes up,
it says it is disabled. Ok, so I try to scroll down the page to reactivate
it, when the BIOS screen freezes forcing me to boot again. It freezes every
time I attempt to scroll down or across a page - I am locked out of my bios
(it is v 1019)! The computer is also suddenly rebooting itself for no
reason - this doesn't happen too often, but it never happened more than 2
weeks ago. Other weird things are suddenly cropping up - for example,
yesterday I suddenly lost all my bookmarks in Firefox. They just disappeared
leaving me with an empty list. Does my motherboard sound like it's dying? Or
could it be the power supply maybe - its an Antec true control 550. Hope
someone has an idea what's happening because at this point my computer is
acting like its haunted by mischievous gremlins - which I guess is in
keeping with the season... I have a feeling I need to Ghost my hard drive
just in case.

Thanks for any ideas...
Click to expand...

The BIOS screen freezing points at hardware. The BIOS is not the
highest power state for the computer, so at that point, it
probably is not the power supply. It could be a motherboard
component is failing, or one of the on-board motherboard
voltage regulation circuits is not working right. Since
internal motherboard voltages are not monitored, it is
pretty hard to tell what is going on.

Rebooting in Windows could point to the power supply, especially
if you are in a high power mode at the time. Try running Prime95,
CPUburn, SuperPI, or the like, just as a means of drawing a bit
more current from the supply. If the machine reboots right
after a "loading" program starts, that could point to the PSU.

Have you looked at the voltages in the monitor page in the
BIOS ? Does the screen freeze when accessing the monitor chip
(as triggered by entering the monitor page) ?

Asus Probe could be used to display the system voltages while you
work. See if a reboot correlates with a dip in one of the
voltage rails.

When it comes to some errant behaviors in Windows, it is a bit
tougher to put 2+2 together and get an answer. After all,
gremlins could be malware of some sort.

Backing up the drive is a great idea. You can never be too safe.
But, you may find, that just the act of trying to backup, is
enough to "tip it over". In which case, removing the drive
and taking it to a stable computer for backup, would be
an alternative method.

If the memory was the problem, I'd expect to see more BSODs,
crashes, and the like, as rebooting all the time without at
least some BSODs or nice error messages, is not like a memory.
Of course, if a memory has a stuck bit, in some region of memory
occupied by a "ticklish" part of the OS, anything is possible.
At this preliminary point, I wouldn't be reaching for
memtest86+ quite yet, at least until you run out of other things
to try. If you have more than one stick of RAM, you could try
the sticks one at a time, and see if the symptoms change
at all.

I wonder - is the Registry loaded into memory all the time ?
Maybe if the Registry got corrupted, that could account for
programs acting strange ?

Paul
 
Well, just to let everyone know, I found a solution to the gremlins in my PC
situation. I had to replace a few parts:


1. swapped the P4P800 motherboard with an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe.

2. Then had to swap out the old Video Card for dual BFG Nvidia 7800 PCI-x
and also had to get AMD X2 3800 to get it all to work,

3. In case the PS was at fault, got an Enermax 600 watt sli-ready monster,
the eg701ax,

4. And to guard against a potentially fried HD, got a WD 75G Raptor SATA,

5. Took a chance and am still using my 'old' 512 MB matched Corsair low
latency DDR.

Just in case it was an 'ugliness' problem, switched the Case with an Antec
P180 triple noise shielded tower - man was that an experience to set up!. I
thought I could see those pesky gremlins leaving in panic :-)

Took care of the problem... I'm flat broke but happy :-)
 
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