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General discussion

Built computer myself, got some issues

Nov 30, 2004 10:17PM PST

well i finally decided to build my own computer piece by piece and found that i actually did it right! I upgraded from an old mobo and a 1ghz AMD thunderbird w/ sdram. Here is what i got:

arctic silver ceramique thermal paste
AMD athlon xp barton 2.1ghz
Asus a7n8x-e deluxe nforce2 mobo
2 bars of corsair 512MB DDR pc 3200
thermaltake silentboost cpu fan
ATI all in wonder radeon 9600
seagate 160gb SATA hard drive 7200RPM
western digital 40gb hard drive

I run on windows 98SE only... So first thing i noticed is that i cant have a drive any larger than 135GB because of 98.. yay!... I had to partition and i still have about 30gigs unaccounted for that i CANT use, any suggestions about that are welcome.. Here are my issues though:

1. I cant recall what programs they were but two of them showed my processor as 1.3 & 1.4 Ghz only! This seems kind of true because it takes about 3 minutes to load windows sometimes more (longer than w/ my old 1ghz thunderbird) and also many applications dont show the impact of my processor being twice as fast now.

2. I get system hangups when the processor led is not blinking but there is something going on in the background

3. Extremely slow transfer from hard drive to hard drive. If i move around 10gigs or more, i usually get an auto system reboot eventually... When i leave my pc on overnight to encode dvds ill usually wake up to a reset pc and an invalid/crashed file

I was really expecting win98 to be on crack w/ this new configuration that it was probably not made to ever witness but instead im very disappointed that such an optimal setup could be so slow, i know something has to be wrong here. I've tested my pc w/ the new warhammer demo and i was able to run it on full config with only some frame hits, i also can now run the highly demanding AVS plugin for winamp in fullscreen which i could barely use in half screen before. My corsair memory IS reporting correctly at about 1.2ghz. I have not been able to go online and update drivers but i will eventually do that, that might be a problem. Please give me some advice.

Discussion is locked

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Re: Built computer myself, got some issues
Nov 30, 2004 10:38PM PST

The 137GB drive limit is DOS. There is also an issue with over 512M with Windows 98. This article explains how to limit Windows to 512M.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q253912/

In closing, some machine misbehave with both sticks of RAM and that is a warranty issue.

Bob

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Re: Built computer myself, got some issues
Dec 1, 2004 6:12AM PST

im not worried too much about the ram, i will try that out though... what worries me most is that my processor is not showing over a third of its processing, ive never heard of any case where a 2ghz could possible report as a 1.3... has anyone???

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CPU report...
Dec 1, 2004 6:19AM PST

Usually a sign the BIOS is out of date or you set the FSB wrong. A new board does not mean the BIOS is current.

Bob

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Re: Built computer myself, got some issues
Dec 1, 2004 6:56AM PST

im not worried too much about the ram, i will try that out though... what worries me most is that my processor is not showing over a third of its processing, ive never heard of any case where a 2ghz could possible report as a 1.3... has anyone???