Official "Computer Troubles" Thread

[Signor 65]

Sigh...here you people go again with seemingly unsolvable problems :p

Right, you can play everything else fine? Crysis, high settings, reasonably ok resolution for hours and hours? Only one thing pops to mind here: a corrupt DirectX install, or buggered registry keys. When you bought your games, did you click the "Yes, Install" button?

I suggest getting hold of the latest DirectX version for your OS and installing that. Before you install it, follow this guide, which helpd me in a pinch with a corrupt DX9 install.

Also...is your house haunted?:p

Thanks for the advice, I'm sure it will help me to sort out this problem. Oh and by the way my house is in fact haunted by a dead flower, it's lost soul stalking the land forever and sending shivers down the spines of men, women and inbred retard children...

[cov1e_stalker]

Hay people of technological help ! What should i do if my new 23' monitor has a vertical line of pixels that won't go away and stay one colour ? Oncoming hardware failure ?

[Wesley]

Hay people of technological help ! What should i do if my new 23' monitor has a vertical line of pixels that won't go away and stay one colour ? Oncoming hardware failure ?

No, just merely a nice, solid line of dead pixels. Is you screen still under warranty? What make and model is it?

[Signor 65]

Hay people of technological help ! What should i do if my new 23' monitor has a vertical line of pixels that won't go away and stay one colour ? Oncoming hardware failure ?

Firstly, what colour is the line? Secondly, are you by any chance running SLI? I used to run a SLI setup long ago (2005-2006) and there was also a problem on my screen (also a solid line of pixels going down the LCD), it turns out that there was a setting in the nVidia SLI options that displays the sharing between the two GPUs, and this was turned on. I just turned it off and voila! Problem solved.

Depends if you run SLI though...
If you don't then it is basically 100% that it is a nice little stream of dead pixels...

[TiberiumKing]

Hallo people. I have a problem that will really get the worst of me if it continues. It randomly started this weekend when I booted my pc and started playing the Burnout trial, when after about 5min it started to lag extremely.

I have since tested it, and it happens to virtually every other game I play (which used to be fine). If I minimize the game, and leave my pc for a few minutes, it plays fine again for about a minute, and the same thing happens.

I have tried installing updated drivers for my gpu, as well as closing background tasks and system restore, but nothing works.

I have a fairly old budget pc, closing in on an age of two years with small upgrades every now and then.

Specs are as follows:
3.0 ghz HT CPU
8400 GPU
1.5gb RAM
80gig hdd + 250 gig hdd
350w psu (I think)

As I said everything used to work fine, except that I had to restart my computer every time I booted it, or else programs start to crash after a minute or two.

Thanks in advance.

[Wesley]

Hallo people. I have a problem that will really get the worst of me if it continues. It randomly started this weekend when I booted my pc and started playing the Burnout trial, when after about 5min it started to lag extremely.

I have since tested it, and it happens to virtually every other game I play (which used to be fine). If I minimize the game, and leave my pc for a few minutes, it plays fine again for about a minute, and the same thing happens.

I have tried installing updated drivers for my gpu, as well as closing background tasks and system restore, but nothing works.

I have a fairly old budget pc, closing in on an age of two years with small upgrades every now and then.

Specs are as follows:
3.0 ghz HT CPU
8400 GPU
1.5gb RAM
80gig hdd + 250 gig hdd
350w psu (I think)

As I said everything used to work fine, except that I had to restart my computer every time I booted it, or else programs start to crash after a minute or two.

Thanks in advance.

This screams a RAM problem. Or a virus. When running a game in windowed mode, start up task manager and watch your CPU load. If your CPU utilization is low, then your RAM is the problem. If your utilization is high, then you have a virus.

I suggest running MemTest86 if you can get it, install it on a floppy drive or cd, and run it for about an hour. It will alert you to any problems.

Also, do a check on your hard drive for disk errors. You can do this in My Computer>Hard Drive right-click>Properties>Tools>Error Checking. Set it to fix errors that it finds, and then reboot your pc to start the test. Now leave and go watch something, or eat, or have lots of coffee.

[Chevron]

Hallo people. I have a problem that will really get the worst of me if it continues. It randomly started this weekend when I booted my pc and started playing the Burnout trial, when after about 5min it started to lag extremely.

I have since tested it, and it happens to virtually every other game I play (which used to be fine). If I minimize the game, and leave my pc for a few minutes, it plays fine again for about a minute, and the same thing happens.

I have tried installing updated drivers for my gpu, as well as closing background tasks and system restore, but nothing works.

I have a fairly old budget pc, closing in on an age of two years with small upgrades every now and then.

Specs are as follows:
3.0 ghz HT CPU
8400 GPU
1.5gb RAM
80gig hdd + 250 gig hdd
350w psu (I think)

As I said everything used to work fine, except that I had to restart my computer every time I booted it, or else programs start to crash after a minute or two.

Thanks in advance.

I'm gonna have to disagree with wes. To me it sounds like overheating gpu. Ram problems would also manifest themselves at other times and usually cause bsod.

If you can borrow a friends graphics to see if you still have the problem.

[cov1e_stalker]

Firstly, what colour is the line? Secondly, are you by any chance running SLI? I used to run a SLI setup long ago (2005-2006) and there was also a problem on my screen (also a solid line of pixels going down the LCD), it turns out that there was a setting in the nVidia SLI options that displays the sharing between the two GPUs, and this was turned on. I just turned it off and voila! Problem solved.

Depends if you run SLI though...
If you don't then it is basically 100% that it is a nice little stream of dead pixels...

Nope , not running SLI (wish i was) , its the samsung 2333 , and it gets the EVOL yellow line when i start it up , but it goes away for 10 or so minutes and somethimes when i rub it , then comes back when the screen heats up, oh and the screen is under warranty. Apart from that all is fine , my older 17' benQ runs fine with my 8800GTS 512.

[N3G4T1v3]

I'm gonna have to disagree with wes. To me it sounds like overheating gpu. Ram problems would also manifest themselves at other times and usually cause bsod.

If you can borrow a friends graphics to see if you still have the problem.

When my old GPU overheated I used to get artifacts all over the screen.
I no once 1 of my old 512MB sticks of ram had dust or something in it, the bios and windows showed it was there but if I tried to play a game, I could my be pay for 3 or so minutes, it would crash to desktop with an error, cleaning my ram fixed that.

Hallo people. I have a problem that will really get the worst of me if it continues. It randomly started this weekend when I booted my pc and started playing the Burnout trial, when after about 5min it started to lag extremely.

I have since tested it, and it happens to virtually every other game I play (which used to be fine). If I minimize the game, and leave my pc for a few minutes, it plays fine again for about a minute, and the same thing happens.

I have tried installing updated drivers for my gpu, as well as closing background tasks and system restore, but nothing works.

I have a fairly old budget pc, closing in on an age of two years with small upgrades every now and then.

Specs are as follows:
3.0 ghz HT CPU
8400 GPU
1.5gb RAM
80gig hdd + 250 gig hdd
350w psu (I think)

As I said everything used to work fine, except that I had to restart my computer every time I booted it, or else programs start to crash after a minute or two.

Thanks in advance.

You might as well give your PC a virus scan just to be sure it isn't a virus, and try clean your ram slots for dust, you never know and my be your PCI-Express slot as well, it may just help

[CrashHelmut]

I'm gonna have to disagree with wes. To me it sounds like overheating gpu. Ram problems would also manifest themselves at other times and usually cause bsod.

If you can borrow a friends graphics to see if you still have the problem.

I've got to say that overheating was the first thing I thought of as well.

Although I would not just constrict it to the GPU overheating, the CPU may also be the culprit (heatsink isn't seated properly for instance).

If I minimize the game, and leave my pc for a few minutes, it plays fine again for about a minute, and the same thing happens.

The fact that things recover somewhat once the system isn't under heavy load tends to point to an overheating issue. I'm not so sure a system will recover if it is experiencing RAM issues, it will just get worse and worse.

Easy to check, use a utility (like hwmonitor) to monitor temperatures while running under load and see if anything goes off the charts.

[LEEROY]

Hi peepz! My dad's pc randomly crashed a while ago and we think it's the bios. is there any way to reflash the bios or is the board dead? It refuses to start at all. It's an ancient GA-8I875P with a P4 3.2GHz churning in it. A similar thing happened to my friends PC, we were playing D2LOD together and his PC randomly froze and it hasnt started since. And then another friends pc did the same thing, only we got it to boot once and it wanted a bios update.

[Chevron]

Hi peepz! My dad's pc randomly crashed a while ago and we think it's the bios. is there any way to reflash the bios or is the board dead? It refuses to start at all. It's an ancient GA-8I875P with a P4 3.2GHz churning in it. A similar thing happened to my friends PC, we were playing D2LOD together and his PC randomly froze and it hasnt started since. And then another friends pc did the same thing, only we got it to boot once and it wanted a bios update.

Ok. With regards to your dad's case it could be that the psu or mobo blew. Check the power supply in another pc, better yet, test another power supply in your dad's pc. If you put a working psu in and it still doesn't start then the mobo is most likely dead.

[LEEROY]

The psu is fine. He got another mobo and hooked it up to the old psu and it runs fine. The original one blew up in my face so we got a new one not too long ago :D

[Zen]

Help?



Switched on my PC this morning, and all was fine. Came home this afternoon from Varsity, and that has happened. My gut feeling tells me, my graphics card has popped. It isn't my RAM as I tested it with others. I plugged my Dad's PC into my screen, it works 100's.

Any ideas?

[Chevron]

Help?

http://i44.tinypic.com/acspr5.jpg

Switched on my PC this morning, and all was fine. Came home this afternoon from Varsity, and that has happened. My gut feeling tells me, my graphics card has popped. It isn't my RAM as I tested it with others. I plugged my Dad's PC into my screen, it works 100's.

Any ideas?

Do you get any artifacts or funny colours before windows loads or when in bios?

[Zen]

Do you get any artifacts or funny colours before windows loads or when in bios?

Oh yeah. My entire POST screen is riddled with artifacts.

[Wesley]

Help?

Switched on my PC this morning, and all was fine. Came home this afternoon from Varsity, and that has happened. My gut feeling tells me, my graphics card has popped. It isn't my RAM as I tested it with others. I plugged my Dad's PC into my screen, it works 100's.

Any ideas?

I have a similar problem, but it was on a laptop with a motherboard that had developed a short. I say take out your GPU and see if the lines are still there. If they are, then its definitely your graphics card acting up. If not, then I blame your motherboard. Are both still under warranty?

[Chevron]

Oh yeah. My entire POST screen is riddled with artifacts.

I'd bet money that your graphics card is stuffed. There's a 1% chance it could be mobo though.

[Zen]

I have a DFI LanParty UT-D nForce 4 Ultra, so it has 2 x PCI-E slots. I only used the first one, swopped my card over to the second one, same thing.

Additionally, my dad's PC is an AGP board. :/

[Wesley]

I have a DFI LanParty UT-D nForce 4 Ultra, so it has 2 x PCI-E slots. I only used the first one, swopped my card over to the second one, same thing.

Additionally, my dad's PC is an AGP board. :/

You swapped slots? Was that what we asked you to do? Take the graphics card out already and boot into Windows to see if your graphics card or motherboard is the problem. Changing between SLI slots wont help at all.