Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit + XP 32bit
Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 @ 3700MHz (412 x 9)
Gigabyte DS3 965P rev 3.3 Motherboard
Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme Heatsink w/ 120mm
6GB DDR2 (2GB Geil ULL PC6400 + 4GB OCZ GOLD PC8500)
500GB Samsung Spinpoint SATA2 hard disk
Leadtec Winfast 7800 GTX graphics card PCI-E
Pioneer DVR-216 DVD-RW
Creative SoundBlaster XFI Soundcard
460W Akasa Paxpower PSU w/ Blue LED fan
Lian Li Plus7B Black Aluminium Chassis
Server - Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition running Active Directory, DNS and hosting this site:
Dell Optiplex GX110
Pentium 3 733MHz
512MB PC133 CL3 RAM (2x256MB)
10GB 5400RPM IDE
200GB 7200RPM IDE
Fix common hardware problems
My computer locks up in Windows
My computer is slower than it should be
I used to own 16 PCs and a laptop around the house - all the towers and PCs without cases were running SETI@Home or Folding@Home 24/7, here are a few pictures of them:
My computer won't run at it's proper speed
This is usually caused by one of the below:
The power supply unit, or PSU, is probably the most under appreciated piece of hardware in a computer today. The PSU doesn't just convert the AC from your wall socket to the DC that your computer's components use, it must handle the wildly fluctuating wave form that the electrical grid is feeding your house or place of business.
The reason for the large price difference (for the wattage) of PSU's is that the wattage marked on the PSU isn't how much power it can actually provide, it's how much power it can in theory consume from the wall socket! This is different from the amount of power that a PSU can provide because not all the power is converted to DC, some of it is emitted as heat. The amount of power a PSU can handle is calculated when their is no load on the circuit, the electrical resistance makes the actual amount of power the PSU can handle much lower than it's rated wattage.
To better quantify the amount of power that a given PSU can PROVIDE to a computer you must look at the COMBINED POWER rating, which is also measured in watts. I personally would recommend that you look for a PSU that has a combined output of 210 W on the +3.3 & +5V rails. This would be sufficient for the following system.
AMD Athlon XP2100+
Asus A7V333
512MB PC2700 DDR RAM
GeForce 4 4200TI
PCI modem
PCI 10/100 MB/S NIC
PCI SoundBlaster 1024 Live
2 80mm case fans
PC's need a power supply that can deliver sufficient power to each of the components. Recently, with the arrival of socket A CPU's this has become more apparent than before. An AMD Duron 800 MHz uses 35.4 Watts of power where as just a 100 MHz faster AMD Athlon 900 uses 50 Watts.
I recommend the Q-Tek 550W PSU for bang for the buck.
Have a look at this review for it's specification.
On your PSU you can find it's max outputs on each rail by looking at a sticker on the side. Usually the right hand side if your looking at it from the front of the case. Should look something like this.
I have run an Athlon XP 1600+ on a picky PC Chips motherboard with a 300W PSU, it was scraping by but it was stable. It was a good 300W though - Aopen (180W combined total output on the +3.3V & +5V rails)
The most picky motherboards when it comes to PSU's are made by PC Chips and ECS. The ECS K7S5A is among the most picky.
RAM that isn't up to the job
Like PSU's, some motherboards are more picky than other's when it comes to memory. (PC Chips/ECS again) If you have a good PSU that meats the requirements for your particular system then RAM is the next thing that could be making your system unstable when you try and run at 133 MHz FSB when it is fine at 100 MHz FSB. A good program to test your RAM is Memtest86. It boots from a floppy disk or even a CD and will run a number of different tests on your memory. Note that these tests take a number of hours to complete.
The best make of memory is by far Corsair but this comes at a price, at more reasonable prices, Crucial and Kingston make some good memory which is worth paying extra for when compared to generic memory that often will not run at it's rated speed.
An old BIOS
Sometimes if you upgrade your CPU an old BIOS will prevent the CPU from working at it's rated speed. To fix this visit your motherboard manufacturer's website and download the latest BIOS. Follow instructions on their site on how to flash the BIOS as it's quite a lengthy process to explain. I would only flash the BIOS if you have no other option. If the flash goes wrong or you try to flash the wrong BIOS to the board it can be very difficult to put right. Sometimes you will need to buy a new BIOS ROM but some boards have these soldered on so you may have to buy a whole new motherboard.
Motherboard doesn't support CPU
Visit your motherboard manufacturer's website to find out which CPU's your motherboard supports and if a BIOS update will allow you to put a faster CPU in.
My computer is slower than it should be
In the device manager go to the primary and secondary IDE controller properties and make sure 'DMA if available' is selected for the transfer mode.
For UDMA (Ultra direct memory access) modes 4 and 5 you will need 80pin conductor cable. If you do not have this the drives will run in UDMA mode 2. Hard drives nowadays should always run in at least UDMA mode 2 for best performance. If they have to run in PIO (programmable input output) mode they will use most of the CPU clock cycles when accessing data. That's why UDMA modes are better as they try not to use the CPU when you access data on the drive. This applies for both CD-RW's and hard drives. CD-RW's should run in multiword DMA mode 2.
This is a list of the transfer rates and their speeds in theory. Drives will run nowhere near these kinds of speeds. The transfer rates are mainly for marketing purposes.
PIO-4 = 16MB/S
UDMA mode 2 - 33 MB/S
UDMA mode 4 - 66 MB/S
UDMA mode 5 - 100 MB/S
UDMA mode 6 - 133 MB/S
If your sure your drive supports UDMA but UDMA will not work properly go into the BIOS and make sure UDMA is enabled and reboot and try again enabling UDMA in the device manager.
This can be caused by a number of different things including a weak PSU or graphics card drives or even the AGP bus speed being too high for the mobo or AGP card. Make sure you have the latest graphics card drives. If you do try older ones. Also if you have a GeForce series of graphics card download RivaTuner of Powerstrip and try lowing the AGP bus to 2X or even 1X. Believe it or not, there isn't much difference between the AGP bus speeds that make it noticeable in games.
If when you press the power button on the front of your PC nothing happens you can try the following things to see if it fixes the problem.
1) Replace the fuse in the plug
2) Make sure the clear CMOS jumper is set to run
3) Try the power taking the power button off from the case headers on the motherboard and short out the two pins with a flat head screw driver.
4) Try the board with the bare minimum components outside the case to eliminate a short circuit from being the problem.
If when you press the power button on the PC the CPU fan spins the problem usually will be down to a fried CPU or RAM that has gone bad or isn't seated all the way into the slot.
Try the following things.
1) Take all RAM out of the DIMM slots and try each module on it's own in DIMM 1 making sure it is seated fully into the slot.
2) Make sure the video card is seated fully. Clean the contacts with an eraser.
3) If you have another compatible CPU lying around try it in your PC that doesn't boot or try the CPU out of the PC that doesn't boot with known working components.
If the PC will POST but will not boot windows try the following things.
1) If it hangs on the boot screen try tapping F8 before Windows loads and boot into safe mode. Remove all devices and reboot. If it still hangs in safe mode look at the file it hangs on and do a google search for the problem.
2) If you have been overclocking and it hangs on the boot screen either raise the CPU vcore slightly or lower the CPU's FSB till the system will boot properly.