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General discussion

Arggh! Screen Still Freezes

Mar 19, 2004 1:02AM PST

Hello, I hope you can help -- been at this since Monday night.

I installed a new hard drive, did a clean install of Windows ME (whoopee!) and discovered the problem was still there - sounded like a wounded washing machine.

Yep, it was my processor fan. Replaced it, and upgraded to a whopping AMD Athlon XP 2200.

Things *seem* fine until I encounter heavy graphics -- and whoom, right back to chain freezes. Or I call em that -- will freeze for many seconds, then a flash and momentary burst of movement, followed immediately (usually) by another long freeze.

It started occuring while playing Everquest, but happens in other applications as well, like the demos for Age of Mythology and Railroad Tycoon 3. They are all, well, unplayable on this system, atm. For grins and just being generally outta ideas, I ran Futuremark's 3DMark03 -- (actually I was hoping it would end with some tips on how to fix this system) -- and got a score of 24. (!)

The 'puter is based on an old Giga-Byte Technology VT8363/5 KT133/KM133 motherboard running 2x 133 FSB with 512 memory. I'm using an NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 video card and Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card.

Right now the sound card is using IRQ 9, a Kingston PCI Fast Internet Adapter IRQ 10, and the PNY video card is on IRQ 11.

Any ideas?

I've been on vacation this week and have let this mess tie up me up.
Thank you.

Discussion is locked

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Re:Arggh! Screen Still Freezes
Mar 19, 2004 4:18AM PST

Consider a new power supply with more power (more watts). This CPU uses more power than the old one, and graphics card does need a lot too.

Kees

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Re:Arggh! Screen Still Freezes
Mar 19, 2004 8:01AM PST

Things to try that are FREE.

Remove the cover, get a small fan and point it at the innards. Any change?

Install latest drivers for
mobo
sound
video

The only cost in this is your time and effort.
It is quite possible that the only thing you will learn from doing this is what it is NOT.

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Re:Re:Arggh! Screen Still Freezes
Mar 19, 2004 8:49AM PST

Thanks for the tips. The fan is going and the drivers are updated. No change Silly

Still trying to figure it out.

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Re:Re:Re:Arggh! Screen Still Freezes
Mar 19, 2004 10:33AM PST

Bah! It was the video card and/or the video card.

Thanks for your help, folks. It's good to know we're not the only ones banging our heads on desks in the middle of the American night. =)