Oookay... Getting annoyed now

[Tammarion]

My computer is seriously bugged. Suffers from occasional random reboots, and locks up within seconds of loading up CoH.

On bad days, it will restart before loading winxp.

Reformatted and reinstalled XP plenty of times, replaced motherboard. I suspect its the HD now, but can't get a hold of another HD to replace it atm.

It was suggested that my power supply might be the cause, pcprobe places 12/5/3.3v values at 11/5/3.3v, is this far our of line?

I think I'll pay a visit to the future shop, buy a HD, and return it if another HD I have comes back from RMA.

On another note, another HD (yes, i might have 3 bad HDs) I have put into a USB drive kit works fine, but when i took it out and hooked it up directly to a IDE, it made soft beeping noises and refused to be detected by the mobo.

[Rooster]

Check the fan on your video card. If it locks up quickly in CoH, it may be because of heat.

Have you run a diagnostic on the hard drive? there's lots of availble. Seagate has a generic one that will work if you can't find any others.

It's at 11v? not 11.5, or something like that? 11V is a wee low. What else are you running?

I'd run a full scan disk and a HDD diagnostic before blaming the drive. I've got a friends machine here right now that was reporting bad sectors. I did a complete wipe, drive diagnostic (found bad sectors but was able to write to them... ?) and gave it another go. Still having major problems.

Ran a memory test (memtest86) and it came up clean twice in a row. <--- good one to run if you're having wierd problems, crashes, etc...

Also, check for spyware using Spybot S&D (1.3), Ad-Aware, do an online virus scan check: http://housecall.antivirus.com

Let me know how that goes.

[Tammarion]

The comps spybot/virus free - repartioning the HD will do that :)
memtest+ gives one address on the memory thats giving errors, its been that way since I got it.

Other than that, I've pretty much stripped down the computer. 9500 pro, ibm deskstar 45 gig drive, cd burner, ati tv card.

One odd point - I had lockups on one toon just after loading. So I played the other one, then quit and came back, and its played just fine.

On other installs, it would lock up in the login screen, and even on IE. :(

[Tammarion]

Ran the extended seagate self-test - and boom

S.M.A.R.T. error. :(

[Rooster]

That's bad.

Backup anything you wanna keep - RMA the drive. SMART is rarely wrong.

[Tammarion]

oh its soooo far past its expected lifespan - its an IBM drive... (IBM stopped making HDs 2 years ago :D )

[Tammarion]

One thing thats strange: A sign that its about to be trouble is that the CD starts to work - like its trying to write to the CD drive for some reason.

[Rooster]

That's wierd, unless the controller is "panicking"... but I've never heard of that before.

[Tammarion]

Oookay - the computer wouldn't get 5 seconds into opening a web browser this morning, and I loaded up the bios, went to hardware monitor and found the culprit red-handed. Power supply was kicking out only 4.3 V on the 5V channel.

Sigh. An Enermax 430W with 5 years service. :(

Got a Thermaltake installed, and putting it through the paces.

[Rooster]

4.3 is a wee low... that's almost 20%.

[Tammarion]

Ya the funny thing is that its been running okay for the last 5 years, and didn't announce its failure with a bang or anything. Just this on and off slow failure. So far my comp is running okay now. Go figure.

[spyder913]

I've never seen a power supply not fail catastrophically, hehe

[Slicks]

my power supply that failed.....caught on fire for a couple seconds.....was easy to spot that with the inside roof of my comp burn/black and the metal of the p/s was all black and the comp didnt turn on.....huh go figure on that one :)

[Andolinni]

I've never seen a power supply not fail catastrophically, hehe

same. hehe, i was actually ganna say check your bio's and your power supply from the beginning, unfortunantly everyone else beat me to the punch, seeing how this thread is soooo old i'm just here to take up net space, kthxbye :fuct: