Thetownend.com

Right. Long story short.

I bought a new pc. Happy. Installed sound card, as adding soundcard drivers the pc crashes. It reboots and goes through post screen then goes blank, but PC remains on. Tried both graphics cards outputs, and 2 different monitors.

I then decided it was something to do with the soundcard, so removed it. Same as before, counts ram etc, then screen goes blank when windows logo should appear.

Here's what has happened. With the large soundcard in the pc a cable was pushed against the graphics card fan and stopped then fan rotating. If this has burned the gpu, would i still get to see the post screen? Does this bypass the gpu?

I only ask because i have done nothing else and it's probably gonna be the mobo or the graphics card. I'm not familiar with these new pci-e cards, so seems stupid that it could be blown yet i still get to see the bios screen thang.

I just hope that it ain't the mobo, which is what my head tells me.

I also don't want to have to spend £30 sending it back to Laandaaaan when i could spend £30 on a new graphics card, and save the hassle.

Oh and my brand new fucking monitor has a dead pixel and it was the last one in stock. Nice.

have you tried puttin your windows disk back in and booting from that first?

If it posts it aint the mobo. Do you hear the normal beep from when it posts?

It aint the graphics, because the GPU is providing your monitor with a signal to show the post screen

And I think the drivers made your pc go mental, not a wire that stopped the fan

Well that's what i hoped, but there is no way i can get any kind of boot. It does still beep, does still count al the ram, recognise processor etc, there is nothing in the mobo apart from the ram and graphics card. If i put an windows disk in, the same happens, it won't give me the press any key to boot message, or react post bios screen.

It's a weird one. All the hardware is brand new.

Have you tried booting using last known good settings? (hit F8 lots in the post screen)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314503

Doesn't allow me to get any of those, as i originally wanted to try safemode, because i also upped the graphics resolution by a massive amount. I know how silly it sounds, but all i can do is see the post screen or go into bios. That's it.

I just remembered. F8 on my new pc is boot order, so couldn't try to get into safe mode. I just checked that MS article, it's possible it's windows thinking about it, i forgot a massive factor when describing the pc.

I used nLite to chop XP ISO down to 165mb, from 610mb, i may have seriously corrupted the system!  :oops:

There was me feeling clever with XP only using 44mb ram when static. I'm a bit of a twat you see.

Even so, i should still be able to do a reinstall shouldn't i? And yes, CD is before my primary drive... I think. :D Fucking hell, i wish i was sat next to it and could have another fiddle now. Thanks so far, although i feel that there's something fucked, as i'm pretty down with the workings of them.

Disks are sata if that makes any difference.

It sounds like XP is twatted. I'd reinstall it mate.

Like I said mobo wouldn't post if it was fecked and GPU would display nothing. I think it's XP throwing a wobbly.

Okay, i'll have a go with an fairly untampered xp install tomorrow. Thanks for the help Si Pie.

this is why i don't like streamlined iso's  :D

I'm a greedy cunt when it comes to resources though and i'll do everything i can by editing the arse out the registry, services.msc, removing all animation, cd autorun, disk indexing, IE, power settings sound settings, auto updates, security, netowrking, tcp/ip. god the list gets long.

It would seem i sometimes get a bit carried away though. But this was my record install. 44mb of ram being used when just resting on windows desktop. I may have only saved about 8mb ish over my previous best, but i still made a white sticky mess on my keyboard.

do you overclock as well?

geeeeeeeek :D

No i don't do that! I just need every little last scrap of ram and resource for my apps. I also like silence, so big fans and stupid cooling, are a no no. Unless i could get me some water cooling, then i might be tempted.  :oops:

To be fair i've never considered it. I love my stability, believe it or not, so overclocking would be too much of a risk for my liking.

In my younger days i also bought a brand new Barton Core AMD and a lovely copper heat pipe heat sink both at great expense. Lets just say it never lived long enough for me to see how it ran, as i forgot to put thermal paste on the fan when i attached it, heard an alarm about 10 seconds into the boot, then nothing. That left a very nasty taste in my mouth and I don't fancy the taste of deliberately trying to cook any new cpu. :)

i didn't understand a word of that  :D

Oh...  :oops:

Maybe i should start overclocking then. :D

just a term i heard from a mate who likes messing with pcs. seems akin to putting a catering size baked bean can of an exhaust pipe on a 1.2 Nova to me.

It is really. It's just running a little bit more power through a processor to create greater umph. This causes the processor to run hotter and eventually become unstable. Some say there is a risk a blackhole could be created. I think they're speaking bollocks though, but that's just a hunch, but then i know a lot less than i pretend to.

Having had a quick read of the symproms....IMO

When you installed the sound card did you disable the onboard sound on the mobo...if it had onboard sound? as that will lock the pc up totally on boot up after the bios boots.

If you had no onboard sound then does it boot up in safe mode uninstall the sound card as that could be faulty.

Or just remove the sound card totally and boot the PC up...does that work?

If it does then it could be the card itself or the driver is fucked.

If it does not boot up then it could well be the GPU, are the sound and GPU card sat in the mobo straight? if they are even slightly askew it wont contact properly and will stop it booting.

There is a good chance that you have burnt the GPU but in such a short time it sounds unlikely as it usually takes a little longer..unless you have poor airflow.

If the GPU has burnt then yes it can boot up to bios then fall over as soon as the components get hot, if you dont need a great graphics card...as we talked about before...then get one with not cooling fan, cheap and cheerful, about £15in vat and p+p.

But to me it doesnt sound like the mobo has fucked but either the sound or graphics cards, with it mor elikely to be the sound card.

As for overclocking...nice and easy...most mobos and chips can easily cope with 10%-15% extra and the bios comes with an auto overclock now, easy peasy....try resetting the bios if all goes pear shaped!

Overclocking has saved me a few hundred quid. I'm quite happy about that. The new heatsink only cost £15 including p&p and it allows me to overclock my processor by well over 1 ghz extra.

Yeah completely disabled.



Soundcard was removed, no change. The card should be sound, and when windows did work, it had no issue, until i attempted to put the drivers on.

Couldn't get the thing into safemode as f8 is also boot order and there is a tiny amount of time before post screen and blank screen. :(



All straight and fine.



It was probably 10 minutes until it died. As prior to the soundcad drivers attempting to be installed, i started adding some basic software.



This is what i may do. After our little talk i spoke with the builder who was supposed to put in a faless card, as he had the 8500gt, less fan, for the same price. I should blame him if the gpu has fallen over! :D



The soundcard should be sound, it's bit of a motherfucker with it's own processors and stuff, but i have no reason to believe it doesn't work. Well, apart from the pc not working... Thanks for your help. I'm getting back in front of it within the next few hours and will be trying a load of diffferent things to see what happens. Not least waiting for the split second between the post screen and the attempted windows boot, to press f8. It's annoying that f8 on my mobo is also the bot order!



Fucking hell. That's one hell of an increase.  8)

Just had a quick look - Try taking it down to complete basics i.e. take out the extra cards etc that you can so leaving your system with just basic components i.e. video / memory etc and see what happens, it may even be that XP has got corrupted by the drivers you put on, check the manufacturers website for latest drivers and download them as well.

Right problem solved. God i must have been super tired or something. I'd love to make up some bullshit and say something had blown, but no. Everything was fine.

Seems my streamlined ISO was to blame. Cutting XP down to 165mb, clearly created problems. Then f8 being boot order confused me, i had to catch it between, post and boot. I had also removed everything from the boot order apart from the master drive. Fuck me i'm a clever cunt. :oops:

As Si said, XP was twatted. Spent all day getting it working, as tried about 3 more streamlined installs, then got it right at about 380mb. Seems my desires for less resource usage was stupid anyway, because the new soundcard needs 50mb and must run at all times. Thanks for helping everyone, if it wasn't for you lot, it would be in London now and costing me money.

Glad it got sorted though.

What mystified me is how you got so hung up about 44mb of RAM usage in the first place?  :D

Happens to the best and worst of us though. After setting up my disks in RAID I though was there really any point to that?

I just like to look at the performance and see that windows is not robbing me of my ram! Every last drop matters. :D

I did the raid thing with my backup device. Jesus, and i thought formatting in Win 98 was slow! I wanted it because i'm terrified of losing info. Last year i lost 250GB and i cried with pain. I recovered about 20GB, but i was fucking livid.

Since then i bought a nas, which is mirrored raid, so has 2 copies, and my new pc has 3 drives to ensure i don't lose useless collections of crap again. :D

I kinda want mine in RAID 1 now, but for some amazingly daft reason I thought I'd try RAID 0 for a laugh (to see if it did boost performance) and never changed after that.

I suppose there isn't much on my computer at the moment and all of it could be moved to my external drive, so I should probably get round to doing it while I have the time off.

I want quicker RAM soon, that will give you better performance than the 44mb you lose from XP  :)

my laptop is painfully shit and slow - can you tell me what to do to make it quicker?

What's the spec?

p4 2.66ghz, 768mb ram

XP I take it?

More memory would make it quicker - depending how much it will take, a couple of sticks won't set you back too much cost wise.

If the hard drive is full then try and get rid of unwanted files - or burn to a disk. Uninstall the programs you don't use (old games etc). Then defrag the hard drive.

Also booting into safe mode and doing an anti virus and a spyware scan will help.

Unfortunately the processor is old but it should still be good for most things. Is there anythign in particular that's slow?

there's no games on there, it runs xp, i defrag every couple of weeks, i run AV and spyware checks weekly, the HD is under half full (30GB capacity). I've stripped everything off it i can. it still won't play videos without jumping around or the sound getting out of sync with the video and it takes about 8 hours (no joke) to burn a DVD on nero.

Still wouldn't stop me trying to prevent windows robbing me of my memory. :)

For my new pc i squeezed as much ram in as i could for 32bit XP. I actually overstepped the limit, but it means i can afford to give a load more to the soundcard, so windows shouldn't be too concerned.

I wanted raid 0 on my new pc, but decided i was being a twat, again, as the drives are quicker than anthing else i've ever had. I'd also heard of some raid 0 arrays breaking, so acted like an adult and just kept it all normal.

turn it off and turn it on again

Hmm, I'm not quite sure what you mean about giving the sound card more memory but I'll take your word for it

The system is built for music production and the sound card has it's own processor/s for use with effects, an on board synthesiser and a sampler.

Depending on the environment you're working in and the load on the cpu, ram and hardrives, you can choose to load more sound into the ram, as opposed for it to be read from the hardrive.

If for example you have a large number of audio files being read from the hard drive, it may start to crack or pop, because the hard drive has hit it's limit.

So what you can do is tell the sampler to either, read ahead further (load more into the ram, slightly increasing cpu load, and lowering HD load), or load some or all sounds entirely into the ram, increasing use of soundcard processor, but significantly lowering HD usage and giving you the quality back and a little room to play with elsewhere.

But do you ever run out of RAM? :D

I used to, but then i've never had over 1GB or a sound card of this standard before, so every mb counted, hence my pathetic tendency to fight windows for every last scrap of free memory! Windows won't beat me this time. :D

Just thought i'd post the next step in my Frank Spencer like computer escapades.

Today I spent about 4 hours installing software and plugins, then started finding some didn't work (i didn't check as i went!). Then I decided to up the sample rate on my soundcard and see what happened. The soundcard errored and then closed itself down followed closely by a lovely blue screen.

Now everytime i turn it on it insists it has no page file, yet i can clearly see it has, and everytime i shut it down it blue screens and its also hyper unstable. I'm such a cock don't you know.

Install 4 (less streamlined) here i come... :soapy tit wank: