I just fired up my laptop to say...

[ColinJ]

I'm not having a good day...

 

[beanzontoast]

Sorry to hear this.

Let me guess... has something broken?

 

[ColinJ]

My tower PC died! I got it for Christmas in 2001 so I've had my money's worth out of it but I can't afford a new one.

It has been running on only 512 MB of RAM and using onboard graphics. That is fine for general Internet access and the other things I do, but I've started playing about with video and it was struggling so I decided to treat myself to some more memory with my birthday cash. It's old stuff, so it was a stiff £29 for 2 512 MB DDR DIMMs.

As well as that, I scrounged a GeForce graphics card from my nephew's dead PC - his hard drive died on him and he got a fantastic Mac for Christmas so he wasn't bothered about the PC any more!

I was looking forward to using a much snappier PC until I could afford to buy something really powerful for video editing.

While I was waiting for my new DIMMs to arrive, I installed the graphics card. It took a while to sort out drivers for it, and I had reclaimed the 32 MB that the onboard graphics had been using.

Oh, but the HD videos on YouTube still didn't play properly. Turns out that thousands of people have the same problem! It's something to do with the Flash player not the PC hardware. If I download the videos and play them in another player, they work fine.

So the graphics card might have been unnecessary after all. Never mind, it couldn't hurt. Could it...? Actually, it could! My previously stable machine started locking up once a day. Damn.

Then I discovered that the card manufacturer states that a minimum of a 400 W power supply is required. Mine is only 300 W... I toyed with buying a new power supply as well, but hang on - this is exactly why I never spent any money on the PC before. Better to save for a new one. Scrap that idea, I'll take the card out and go back to onboard graphics...

Oh, the postman has been! My DIMMs have arrived. Okay, i can put the DIMMs in at the same time that I take the card out, which is handy because the PC lives tucked out of the way inside an old office desk which I removed the drawers from on one side. It's very neat and fine when I'm not playing about inside the PC, but a damn nuisance when I am! Pull the bookshelf out of the way to gain access to the cabling, unplug it all, pull the tower out of the front of the desk, take the outside off the case, do what I'm doing, put everything back together again...

So what happened next...? You got it, the PC wouldn't boot! I mess about with BIOS settings, reenable the power-on memory test - the PC dies doing it!

So, is it a faulty DIMM? Now I have to take one out at a time and see if the other works. Which would be great if I didn't have to hump furniture about and rewire half my house each time!

I'm having a big mug of tea and trying to calm down. I'll see if one of the DIMMs is okay. Maybe I could use my 2 256 MB DIMMS with that and claim my money back on the other? At least I'd have (1024-32) MB to play with then rather than (512-32) MB.


(Sharp intake of breath...) Right, I'm going in - I may be some time!

 

[ColinJ]

Burning laptops is always good therapy!

Yeahbut the laptop is still working!

 

[ian turner]

A much snappier 9 year old pc ?
512MB would be the bare minimum for a system running on XP SP2 or SP3.
When did you last do a clean install of the OS ?
How old and how big is your main hard drive ?

 

[ColinJ]

A much snappier 9 year old pc ?
512MB would be the bare minimum for a system running on XP SP2 or SP3.
When did you last do a clean install of the OS ?
How old and how big is your main hard drive ?

That's what I'm getting at... I have been running on the bare minimum of memory and it showed. As soon as I started to run several applications at once, the hard drive would be thrashing away. I'm running Win XP with all the latest updates.

90+% of my time I was only using the Internet or a text editor. The rest of the time would be spent reading PDFs or playing Spider Solitaire.

Until I started playing about with video, my system was okay. Oh, and I'd also like to run something like Cakewalk or Cubase (or whatever the latest music software package is). For now, Audacity does the trick.

I know that the PC is old and video is very demanding but I'm not going to be applying loads of special effects or working on epics. I just want to edit 10 minute 720p video clips down to bite-sized chunks and cut out the ums and ers.

I last did a clean install about 3 or 4 years ago when my hard drive died. I don't tend to install hundreds of applications so my system doesn't get as clogged up as many people's do.

My hard drive dates back to the previous drive failure. I can't see the relevance of the size of it since it is only about 30% full. (80 GB, by the way.) Yes, I know video eats hard drive space!

All of this is a distraction. I'm just annoyed that the new memory seems to be faulty. Either that, or I've cracked a track on the motherboard or something. I'll have to find somewhere else to put the tower while I'm working on it because it is doing my head in moving it in and out of its cubby hole!

When my income has picked up again, I'll treat myself to a monstrously powerful system with huge drives and a massive screen, but for now, I just need to get this system up and running again, preferably a bit quicker than before. I'll check it boots with the old DIMMs in, then I'll try both of the new DIMMs in the 3rd slot. If one works and one doesn't, the faulty one will go back. I am 95% sure that the memory is compatible. It's PC2700 spec, unbuffered, non-ECC. The original DIMMS are PC2100, but PC2700 is supposed to be backwardly compatible. Perhaps I'll try just the new DIMMs without the old one, see if that makes a difference?

 

[ian turner]

What motherboard or PC Make/Model is it ?
Did you just stick the new memory in slots 2 and 3 ?
Sometimes they can insist on matched pairs in 2 of the slots so either in 1 and 2 or 1 and 3.

 

[classic33]

If it was only the harddrive that had died, why didn't you just swap drives. Yours in his. Or strip his out entirely & replace it in the case you had.

Regarding the power supply, whats the rating on the one that you took the graphics card from?

 

[HLaB]

My mum said her lap top was burst and it keeps booting up. So I had a look at it; a screen saver was running!

 

[ian turner]

Note the original post says 300w and the card spec says 400w and while a decent 300w psu might still be up to it a bog standard cheapie probably isn't and the OP isn't keen on spending more (about £20 for the cheap end of a 400-500w psu). If the graphics card from the nephews PC fits the OPs then odds on it being almost as old with an AGP slot.
Given you can get a new base unit for as little as £250 with 1gb of RAM and Windows 7 (or £180 with 2gb of RAM if you have an OS to install) spending effectively a £59 on the old machine is a major chunk of the cost of a completely new unit.

 

[fossyant]

Best tip is to put back as it was, then start to change 1 bit at a time. I.e. get the old vid card in, then put the memory in.

The Vid card can be an issue. Does the new vid card have a PC power socket on it (Molex) - if it does you would need to use it. I've got a 5-6 year old system that has a very fast AGP card, but needs a power connector in addition.

 

[Night Train]

My desk top died a few weeks ago.

It just stopped and the screen froze. I switched the monitor off and then on and it was just a black screen. The CPU doesn't make any of the usual hard drive noises. It just turns on, shows an LED light and that's all.

Haven't had the time to do anything about it yet.

 

[ColinJ]

It did occur to me to transplant my hard drive into my nephew's PC, but that has had its RAM nicked by my bro-in-law! It also has the loudest fans known to man and I couldn't put up with them. Once you start looking at replacing fans and memory, it's back to the question of spending money on old PCs rather than saving for a new one. Also, doesn't WinXP throw a wobbly if it discovers that it is running in a new set of hardware? (To stop people just cloning drives.) His system was almost as old as mine, and yes, it was an old AGP card.

I thought £28 spent on expanding the memory in my old PC might get me through the next few months after which time a super duper audio-visual workstation might be on the cards!

My motherboard is an oddity - it has an NForce1 chipset and was made by MSI. I downloaded the manual for it to check the memory config and I could swear that I got it right. Mind you, the config that I've been using for nearly 10 years isn't one of the combinations shown in the manual so that doesn't inspire confidence!

Now then...

I took one of the 2 new DIMMS out leaving one new 512 MB module and one of the original 256 MB ones. I got the BIOS to run a memory check and it passed, but when I tried booting WinXP, I got a quick BSOD and then it rebooted itself. I just booted into Safe Mode and did a System Restore to yesterday. I'll see what progress I can make tomorrow...

 

[ColinJ]

Best tip is to put back as it was, then start to change 1 bit at a time. I.e. get the old vid card in, then put the memory in.

The Vid card can be an issue. Does the new vid card have a PC power socket on it (Molex) - if it does you would need to use it. I've got a 5-6 year old system that has a very fast AGP card, but needs a power connector in addition.

There wasn't a graphics card before - the mobo has onboard GeForce 2 graphics. I'm back up and running with that now the AGP card has been taken out. Yes, that did have an extra power connector on and I did connect it.

I'm working on the theory that a power drop out caused by the AGP card during bootup might have corrupted a file somewhere, but in that case, why didn't System Restore fix it?

As for the memory - yes, I think I'll go back to 2 x 256 MB in the original slots and see what happens. If I can get that working again, I'll try run a memory test on the 2nd 512 MB module to see whether to send it back or not. If it passes, then I'll try 2 x 512 MB in place of the 256 MB modules.

Hmm - 2 x 512 MB in slots 1 and 3 (where my original DIMMs were) pass the memory test! Speaking of memory tests - my memory (i.e. my brain!) has just had a bit of a flashback to when the PC was new. I'm sure there was a problem with using all 3 slots on this mobo! Perhaps that is why slots 1 and 3 were used?

I've been on the MSI website and there were 7 BIOS updates which I haven't done, at least one of which tackled memory issues! I'm rather scared to try and update the BIOS until I've got the PC working properly again in case it dies during the update and kills the mobo for good!

Still, things are looking up. Now what I need to do is to fix the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death!). That can wait until tomorrow...

 

[just jim]

My desk top died a few weeks ago.

It just stopped and the screen froze. I switched the monitor off and then on and it was just a black screen. The CPU doesn't make any of the usual hard drive noises. It just turns on, shows an LED light
Haven't had the time to do anything about it yet.

Could be your power supply unit has died...