PC still rebooting.. bad RAM? New Chip/motherboard.
Saturday, February 14, 2004 at 10:31 am
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Pent
(22 messages posted)
OK... this has been going on for about a week.
Last Friday my PC had a funny smell coming from it, but at the time nothing was wrong
with it. After I got home from work and booted the PC... right when the Loading WinXP
screen usually comes up it rebooted, and it kept rebooting at the same spot and the
smell started getting worse. So I asked a few people what the cause of it could
be and they told me that more than likely it was my Power Supply (PSU), so I went
out and bought a new PSU... got it home and after installing it the PC still rebooted
at the same spot (once in a great while it would actually reboot to the scandisk
screen and then when it started scanning it would reboot). Since I didnt think it
was the PSU anymore I installed my other PSU back. While installing it I noticed
that I had leaky capcitors on my motherboard and they were very hot, so I automatically
thought I had found the problem... I took the PSU back and swapped it out with a
new motherboard... After installing the board the PC STILL rebooted.
So after that I only hooked up one HDD, my video card (GF4 ti4400), my DVD burner,
modem, one DIMM of 512MB RAM... that seemed to do something for awhile, but after
an hour it rebooted again...
Once again I asked around and someone said that my processor(AthlonXP 2000+) might
be going bad, so went into my BIOS and set the FSB to 100 and the PC booted fine,
so I hooked up everything back like it was originally and as long as I kept the 100FSB
set it didnt reboot.
I ordered a new processor (AthlonXP 2700+) and got it in and installed it (yes, I
used thermal compound) and it ran fine til I realized that the FSB was still at 100FSB
(which only gave me 1.2Ghz of clockspeed), so I set it to 133FSB and it ran fine
at 1.7Ghz, so I then decided to take it to 166FSB to get the actual speed the chip
was supposed to run at (2.17Ghz), BUT the speed actually went back down 1.2Ghz. I
checked to make sure my Vcore for the chip was at 1.65v and it was.. so I forced
the 13x multiplier on the BIOS for the 166FSB... and the PC started to reboot again...
so I took it back down to the default multiplier and 133FSB and it was running ok
for one day... it just rebooted on me about an hour ago...
I have tested the RAM with Memtest86 and had it do one pass.. there were NO errors.
Since last Friday I have reformatted my C: drive at least 5 times because the rebooting
is messing up the actual boot files and windows.
I have no clue what is going on, but I seriously need help with it.
I have a new motherboard and a new proceesor in it, so I doubt it could be either
one of those... the PSU I tried did the same thing as the old PSU, so I exchanged
the new one for the new motherboard.
This is corrupting my other HDDs too...
I formatted several different times with WinXP Pro with and without the SP1 pack...
The only other constants are the video card, RAM(two DIMMs of 512MB RAM), and the
modem (maybe something else I am overlooking), and like I said all of the RAM tests
I have done came back with no errors.
You think the RAM is bad? (no error during testing)
A Virus maybe? (remember I have reformatted and hooked up a totally different HDD
as the C: since this began)
I seriously need help...
Thanks, Pent
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 | PC still rebooting.. bad RAM? New Chip/motherboard. (Pent: Sat, Feb 14, 2004, 10:31 am) |
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