new shuttle

[pcg79]

hi everyone

thanks for your past suggestions; i ended up getting an XP 3200+, cdrw/dvd, radeon 9800 pro and 512 of pc3200.

it was all going fine. until, i turned off my pc for the night. this morning, it rebooted a lot (sometimes not getting to the Windows screen with the moving blue blocks). once i got into safe mode windows, which rebooted itself when i went to device manager (i did get a quick look; nothing wrong but a usb thing i havent gotten round to fixing).

when i finally did get in, everything was crap; 640x480 with 8bit colour
the radeon bits from the advanced section in the display box werent there (you know, the directx, opengl, monitor, etc tabs)

after reinstalling the radeon driver, control panel and stuff, everything went back to normal, the tabs back.

but why did this happen in teh first place!? i didnt uninstall the drivers or anything; and in safe mode, the device manager still listed the card as radeon 9800 pro...

any ideas?

 

[Cask]

I blame stuff like that just on computers being stupid. I went home for a week, came back and my PC wouldn't boot up because a random windows file was corrupt. Had to reinstall windows. No reason for it whatsoever

 

[Dr_Weasel]

We keep having memory errors on some SUN servers at work. Whenever we log the fault with SUN they keep saying that the problems are caused by sun spot activity.....

 

[pcg79]

you people arent helping.

 

[smurkin]

I had the exact same problem a couple of years back..ie broken ATI drivers. I think I was having RAM problems at the time iirc. You fixed it...if it doesn't happen again...I wouldn't lose sleep. Sorry, again not very helpful.

What shuttle you got ? I'm in the market for one at the mo. Shuttle SN85G4 .

/edit ...ah.. I remember now...it was the hydravision software (desktop control) that used to come with atis...it continually caused the drivers to break. Not installing hydravision was the fix.

 

[pcg79]

argh it keeps doing this rebooting shite! help!

 

[Clown]

What drivers are you using?
Does it reboot randomly or when you're doing something?

Make sure everything is seated properly. Make sure you're using the copper cpu cover thingy that came with the Shuttle, so you don't split the CPU. Virus scan. Ad-ware scan. Spy-bot scan. What temperatures are you reaching (case/cpu)?

What Shuttle did you get? What BIOS are you running? Is Windows patched up? Are your anti-virus definitions up to date?

 

[~Yuckfou~]

heat?

 

[pcg79]

Clown; ATI drivers seem to be 6.14 for all drivers (or so it says in the device manager)

reboots are on startup; once i get into windows it all runs like a dream. it takes about 5/6 reboots _from off_ to load up to windows (but if im in windows and i need to restart for some reason, it will restart first time no problems)

ill try again with the seating of everything, but i think its all good (anything in particular i should check?)
i am using the copper thing.

i dont really know how to check temperature in windows but in the bios the temps were about 40 i think? ill check after i reseat everything.

shuttle is sn45g, ill check the bios, yes to windows patches and yes to virus definitions

 

[pcg79]

i downloaded a program called hmonitor; it says my mobo is about 55*C, CPU about 50 (HDD about 49). Phoenix bios, v 6.00 PG

 

[Quige]

reboots are on startup; once i get into windows it all runs like a dream. it takes about 5/6 reboots _from off_ to load up to windows (but if im in windows and i need to restart for some reason, it will restart first time no problems)

That sounds like a classic cracked solder joint, or scratched track type problem. When the system starts up, everything's cold, a connection isn't made properly - by the time, you've done 4 or 5 reboots then stuff's heated up and the metal's expanded and made full contact & everything is hunky-dory until the system cool's down again and the seperation re-occurs. I guess a not correctly seated card or memory stick could cause a similar symptom for the same heating/cooling reasons. Do you recall anything during the build that may have caused something like that ... heavy flexing of the motherboard may sometimes break tracks, a screw driver slipping - done them all myself at one time or another.

What you need to do to track down the problem I'm not so sure I'm afraid. If you had another AGP card to try from an old system, try that & then that may eliminate the GPU card as a possibility - conversely it may point the finger at it. If it's the motherboard then I'm not sure what you can do other than persue a warranty replacement approach - and I guess this may depend on how difficult the supplier is, as they may accuse you of damaging it installing the other components.

Of course you can always argue that it arrived that way, it's sold as a self build and you're prepared to stand up in court and swear that you followed the installation manual to the letter etc., and stand by your consumer rights and insist on a replacement or refund. They can't really prove that you damaged it one way or another, or whether it arrived that way - unless something really obvious has happened to it like a tub of ice cream melting all over the top and dripping down into the case, or it's been dropped from a height and the whole case is warped.

If you paid for it with a credit card you may have more options.

Good luck whatever happens - it must be extremely frustrating to have a problem with you new toy!