Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

Voltage fluctuation

Feb 23, 2005 9:18AM PST

Hi there,
My 2.5 year old PC
AMD Athlon XP 1800+
MSI KT3 Ultra2 (KT333) Motherboard
896(512+256+12Cool MB DDR RAM
40 GB Seagate HDD
Asus GeForce 4 Ti4200 128 MB RAM
Samsung 753S 17" monitor
Kobian KOB85 cabinet with extra fans in front and back

running Win XP Home SP2 with Norton SystemWorks 2003 and MSI PCAlert4

I have been having trouble a couple of times in the past week.
Since I have a recent broadband connection the PC is on for at least 15-18 hrs/day.
I noticed that whenever I try to play a video clip on MediaPlayer the whole thing used to slow down to a crawl. Otherwise the machine was ok for other tasks only slows while playing video.
Then when i started PCALert I noticed that the window for 3.3V was in the red and showed voltages ranging from 2.91 to 2.96 V and there was the alert sound. here is a screenshot- http://server2.uploadit.org/files/cbh5150-pcalert.jpg
It has happened only twice this last week.

What could be trouble? Is it big trouble needing immediate intervention?

Thanks

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Where does this 3V come from?
Feb 23, 2005 9:57AM PST

The power supply.

It may be dying. I'd replace it. Now. A glitch can cause corrupted and loss of data.

- Collapse -
System resources
Feb 23, 2005 12:49PM PST

Change out the p/s unit, its time for a 2 1/2yr. unit. While your system isn't fully stuffed, the wear&tear on the unit can degrade it and now it starting to show it age. A 400W+ unit is a good start, unless you get a namebrand 350W, otherwise a cheapie should be as big as you afford, otherwise you will pay later. 3.3V has to be stable. The WMP is now using the audio segment of your system which is "real time" so anything running in the backgrd. will reflect on its operation as WMP is a real resource hog, so clean-up if possible. Even, the monitoring pgm. is a burden as it really doing "real time" action as well, plus any other s/w you load at startup.

enjoy -----Willy Happy

- Collapse -
(NT) a long shot
Apr 27, 2005 9:50AM PDT

This could be software problem in regurds to some thing you loaded recently, or you need to upgrade you cooling because fast computers like the one you have need the right fans to operate at the right tempurture.