System shutting down for no apparent reason.

  • Thread starter Thread starter Dan Hoskin
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Dan Hoskin

I have a system built on an Asus 442333 board with a Pentium 4 2.0 ghz
processor, 512 meg of memory, 64 meg video card, running on Win XP. It has
gotten in to the habit of shutting down with no warning or aparent reason
lately. It recently had another problem with bieng unwilling to boot up
properly due to missing or corrupt sytem .dll's. (That was rectified by
reloading Win XP, but I have no idea what caused it in the first place.)
Here is a list of what I tried and the results:
1- chkdsk on the c:
-turned up no errors
2- Microsoft Memory testing utility run on the RAM.
-no errors
3- Removed Win XP service pack 2.
-no change.
4- Ran Asus probe to check voltage of power supply and temperatures while
running Winbench 99 sytem tests to get the whole system warmed up.
-The 12v side never dropped below 11.67v.
-The processor temperature went from 28 to 40 degrees, the sytem would
shut down shortly after it hit 40.

I have swapped out the video card and the HD, as well as runnning on a
single 256 meg memory chip to eliminate these as the problem, but no
changes. I just today booted it up and checked the hardware manger to find a
new ! beside the processor saying that windows cannot locate the drivers for
it. Uninstalling and reinstalling it through the hardware manager seems to
have resolved this.

Does this sound like a pooched mother board or processor? Any ideas on how I
can pinpoint what the cause of this poor machines woes? It has been rock
solid for the past year and a half and I don't know what to do from here to
fix it.

Thanks in advance for any replies,
Dan Hoskin
 
"Dan Hoskin" said:
I have a system built on an Asus 442333 board with a Pentium 4 2.0 ghz
processor, 512 meg of memory, 64 meg video card, running on Win XP. It has
gotten in to the habit of shutting down with no warning or aparent reason
lately. It recently had another problem with bieng unwilling to boot up
properly due to missing or corrupt sytem .dll's. (That was rectified by
reloading Win XP, but I have no idea what caused it in the first place.)
Here is a list of what I tried and the results:
1- chkdsk on the c:
-turned up no errors
2- Microsoft Memory testing utility run on the RAM.
-no errors
3- Removed Win XP service pack 2.
-no change.
4- Ran Asus probe to check voltage of power supply and temperatures while
running Winbench 99 sytem tests to get the whole system warmed up.
-The 12v side never dropped below 11.67v.
-The processor temperature went from 28 to 40 degrees, the sytem would
shut down shortly after it hit 40.

I have swapped out the video card and the HD, as well as runnning on a
single 256 meg memory chip to eliminate these as the problem, but no
changes. I just today booted it up and checked the hardware manger to find a
new ! beside the processor saying that windows cannot locate the drivers for
it. Uninstalling and reinstalling it through the hardware manager seems to
have resolved this.

Does this sound like a pooched mother board or processor? Any ideas on how I
can pinpoint what the cause of this poor machines woes? It has been rock
solid for the past year and a half and I don't know what to do from here to
fix it.

Thanks in advance for any replies,
Dan Hoskin
Click to expand...

It is possible for +5VSB to be marginal. That voltage is used to
power RAM when the computer sleeps, but it is also used to manage
the power supply itself. If +5VSB even winks once, the power supply
will shut off.

Try another power supply.

Paul
 
You may have an overheating component in the power supply unit. I would try
replacing that with a known working one of adequate power next.
 
Dan Hoskin said:
I have a system built on an Asus 442333 board with a Pentium 4 2.0 ghz
processor, 512 meg of memory, 64 meg video card, running on Win XP. It has
gotten in to the habit of shutting down with no warning or aparent reason
lately. It recently had another problem with bieng unwilling to boot up
properly due to missing or corrupt sytem .dll's. (That was rectified by
reloading Win XP, but I have no idea what caused it in the first place.)
Click to expand...

This could be due to a failing HDD.
For some reason chkdsk doesn't seem to find bad sectors, even when you use
the /r switch.

I had a similar situation where my raid fell over, with bad sectors being
reported, so I just reloaded on a single disk an thoroughly scanned both
disks, but the same thing happened with the disk I had chosen as my system
disk.
When I formatted with FAT32 and ran scandisk, the bad sectors were found
right away.

HTH.
 
I am going to try a new power supply, I'll let you know how it goes. As far
as the HD being the cause, I put a new one in and it still does exactly the
same thing.

DH
 
Well, put in a new PSU and the voltages are healthier looking, 12v is
actually 12.05 instead of the old ones 11.55 bottom reading. However, the
thing still locks up when my son plays an online game. (miniclips.com's
'Robot Rage') The system plays for a few minutes, then locks up and reboots
itself. ASUS Probe shows all temps and voltages normal.
So, having eliminated most other components, I tried setting the AGP
compatiblity in my bios to x1 instead of x4. It made a huge improvement,
playing the same game for over half an hour and we thought we had it licked.
Unfortunately it locked up again, but didn't force the machine to reboot on
it's own this time though.
Can I assume that my video card is to blame here? It is a NVIDA GeForce 2
MX/MX 400 64 meg card. If I swap it out with a non-AGP card and that fixes
it, it can still be an AGP-setting or MOBO component, right? I will try the
non AGP card that I have here and if that corrects it I may have to bite the
bullet and buy another AGP card.

Is there any way to test a video card?

Thanks,
Dan Hoskin
 
Dan said:
Well, put in a new PSU and the voltages are healthier looking, 12v is
actually 12.05 instead of the old ones 11.55 bottom reading. However, the
thing still locks up when my son plays an online game. (miniclips.com's
'Robot Rage') The system plays for a few minutes, then locks up and reboots
itself. ASUS Probe shows all temps and voltages normal.
So, having eliminated most other components, I tried setting the AGP
compatiblity in my bios to x1 instead of x4. It made a huge improvement,
playing the same game for over half an hour and we thought we had it licked.
Unfortunately it locked up again, but didn't force the machine to reboot on
it's own this time though.
Can I assume that my video card is to blame here? It is a NVIDA GeForce 2
MX/MX 400 64 meg card. If I swap it out with a non-AGP card and that fixes
it, it can still be an AGP-setting or MOBO component, right? I will try the
non AGP card that I have here and if that corrects it I may have to bite the
bullet and buy another AGP card.
Click to expand...

Have you checked the temperature of the video card itself when it
crashes? Some cards get too hot to touch. If the card has a fan check
to see if it is full of dust or not working.
 
I had the same problems with my a7n8xdlx.. I set the ram clock to
100%/200mhzFSB instead of SPD, and kept everything else where it was..
After fighting with the system for several months, that fixed the problem..
 
"Dan Hoskin" said:
Well, put in a new PSU and the voltages are healthier looking, 12v is
actually 12.05 instead of the old ones 11.55 bottom reading. However, the
thing still locks up when my son plays an online game. (miniclips.com's
'Robot Rage') The system plays for a few minutes, then locks up and reboots
itself. ASUS Probe shows all temps and voltages normal.
So, having eliminated most other components, I tried setting the AGP
compatiblity in my bios to x1 instead of x4. It made a huge improvement,
playing the same game for over half an hour and we thought we had it licked.
Unfortunately it locked up again, but didn't force the machine to reboot on
it's own this time though.
Can I assume that my video card is to blame here? It is a NVIDA GeForce 2
MX/MX 400 64 meg card. If I swap it out with a non-AGP card and that fixes
it, it can still be an AGP-setting or MOBO component, right? I will try the
non AGP card that I have here and if that corrects it I may have to bite the
bullet and buy another AGP card.

Is there any way to test a video card?

Thanks,
Dan Hoskin
Click to expand...

Assuming this is the P4S333, there are some AGP drivers on the
Asus web site. Like version 1.17:

http://www.asus.com.tw/support/down...15&l3_id=2&m_id=1&f_name=AGP_1170.zip~zaqwedc

I think I see a utility included there, to adjust the AGP settings.
I don't have the board, so cannot test out the driver package.

Note that, for any ATA/IDE drivers that come in packages like this,
it is better to use the Microsoft IDE driver, rather than a chipset
IDE driver. The Microsoft ones are slower, but more compatible with
stuff like CD/DVD burning software.

Maybe a different chipset AGP GART driver, plus a little tweaking
with the AGP utility, it will work a bit better. I would try to
run it at 4X, but do stuff like disable fastwrite.

In terms of assigning blame, I would think the Northbridge is more
likely to be at fault, tnan the video card. In the past, there
were a lot of substandard AGP interface designs. When using the
AGP utility, a couple of the settings are explained here:

http://groups.google.ca/[email protected]

Paul
 
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