SN41G2 - Instability / crashing is it graphics, mem, hdd or mobo???
I'm having problems with the stability / booting of my SN41G2. I've previously played ut2003 fine, then ut2004 occasionally crashed then about a week ago getting dodgy error messages & crashes (usually after
running some new 3d screensavers or trying to load Far Cry & Call of
Duty).
I have XP Pro SP1 on an SN41G2 (with Silent X 250W fan) running an
Athalon 1400
256MB RAM (Crucial)
speedtouch adsl PCI
Geforce2 mx400 AGP
2 HD's (120GB & 80GB)
cd/dvd combi
USB mouse / PS2 Keyboard
Then this weekend, it crashed again for no reason and after it
wouldn't boot up - getting as far as the safe mode, last good
configuration , normal boot option screen... only no matter what i
select it just auto restarted (under safe mode it got to an
a***bus.sys file before rebooting. So i loaded a backup fiddled about
had to restart for settings to take effect etc and it wouldn't boot
again.
So anyway i played with the BIOS for a while and got it on and Windows
told me: your graphics card is likely causing your system
instabilities... So i shut down, take out the AGP, plug into the
onboard and reboot fine. Then i install the most recent nvidia drivers
which means a restart. But it won't boot again... so i tried the Drive
Image boot cd and it gave me an ACPI (the thing that lets hardware
info available to windows, so running out of ideas i fiddle with the
ram, take it out blow on it... and it works... The over the weekend i
had to keep on fiddling with the ram everytime i wanted to reboot...
Then i noticed that the TV of the onboard was too dark, so i tried the
agp card again assuming i'd tracked it down to the ram... got it
booted ok, but then got a black screen and the monitor told me it had
no signal and the lights on the keyboard/mouse stopped responding...
so i rebooting, then it got 1/2 way through booting and went blank
again...
Then i went back to the onboard, had to fiddle with the ram, but it's
on and i'm not turning it off until i figure out the problem incase it
won't come back on?!?!
I'm guessing its possibly my graphics card & the ram, so i'm tempted
to replace them, going for ram on the approved sn41g2 list and an ati
R9600 agp card. But i don't know that it isn't the motherboard, or
even some random problem with the primary partition on my HD???
Anyone got any ideas?
