mouth
19-02-2004, 09:58 PM
How a simple upgrade can quickly snowball into a major rebuild.
My sons Celeron 1.7 was having trouble keeping up with B.F. 1942 so with a few extra dollars too spend I decided to put in a P4 cpu, only problem the best priced local computer store only had 800fsb cpu's in stock, quick thought to myself, his Asus P4S333-vm M/B won't be compatable but what the hell.
Sure enough M/B won't recognise cpu for what it is (2.8 Ghz) and keeps defaulting to 1.866 Ghz and is very unstable.
Time for a new M.B. - decided on a Gigabyte GA-81PE1000 Pro 2 which was well priced and had all the features he needs ( I've always had good results with Gigabyte boards as I don't overclock, basically their good O.E.M. boards )
What the hell if you're going to buy a board that can run dual channel you may as well go the whole hog, so throw in a 1Gig dual channel kit.( Twin Mos )
Get home throw it all together - NOTHING - dead as a door nail - No fans, No lights, No Beeps - NOTHING
Dead Power Supply - No
Short circuit - couldn't be, No way i'm much to careful for that, yeah right, stupid screw clip on the case was contacting the back of the board.
Thank god for short circuit protection on modern boards.
O.K. format HDD and reinstall WIN 98 ( don't laugh Bill Gates is rich enough ). Install goe's o.k. until the last reboot during install then CRASH!!
Nice black sreen with the words Windows Protection Failure. While loading driver for NDIS you must restart you're computer. Question ? why is it loading a network driver when the only card installed is VGA and every extra is disabled in the Bios. Format and reinstall 3 times same thing.
Back to the computer shop and get an OEM copy of WIN XP as by this time i've almost bought a new computer. The guy at the shop said it must be bad ram or a bad M/B but as I told him it has to be software as the computer runs for over an hour while i'm in the Bios, Formatting, and installing Win 98 then it dies when trying to load the O.S. for the first time now give me a copy of XP please
Get home and install XP - SWEET
Did a Google on NDIS and Microsoft has pages on it. This failure is fairly common on WIN 98 SE and there is a patch for it but what good is it if you can't get into the O.S. to load it and besides I don't have SE.
I think this sort of thing will happen more and more as 98 is less supported and hardware manufacturers concentrate there efforts on being compliant with XP onwards.
So much for a simple upgrade but damn it hums now, 3D 2001 score of 13,200 against an old score of 6,500 with the same Ti 4800 SE graphics card. ( Nothing is overclocked )
Needless to say the boy is stoked and his older brother is gutted as it blows away his Athlon 1800 XP.
My sons Celeron 1.7 was having trouble keeping up with B.F. 1942 so with a few extra dollars too spend I decided to put in a P4 cpu, only problem the best priced local computer store only had 800fsb cpu's in stock, quick thought to myself, his Asus P4S333-vm M/B won't be compatable but what the hell.
Sure enough M/B won't recognise cpu for what it is (2.8 Ghz) and keeps defaulting to 1.866 Ghz and is very unstable.
Time for a new M.B. - decided on a Gigabyte GA-81PE1000 Pro 2 which was well priced and had all the features he needs ( I've always had good results with Gigabyte boards as I don't overclock, basically their good O.E.M. boards )
What the hell if you're going to buy a board that can run dual channel you may as well go the whole hog, so throw in a 1Gig dual channel kit.( Twin Mos )
Get home throw it all together - NOTHING - dead as a door nail - No fans, No lights, No Beeps - NOTHING
Dead Power Supply - No
Short circuit - couldn't be, No way i'm much to careful for that, yeah right, stupid screw clip on the case was contacting the back of the board.
Thank god for short circuit protection on modern boards.
O.K. format HDD and reinstall WIN 98 ( don't laugh Bill Gates is rich enough ). Install goe's o.k. until the last reboot during install then CRASH!!
Nice black sreen with the words Windows Protection Failure. While loading driver for NDIS you must restart you're computer. Question ? why is it loading a network driver when the only card installed is VGA and every extra is disabled in the Bios. Format and reinstall 3 times same thing.
Back to the computer shop and get an OEM copy of WIN XP as by this time i've almost bought a new computer. The guy at the shop said it must be bad ram or a bad M/B but as I told him it has to be software as the computer runs for over an hour while i'm in the Bios, Formatting, and installing Win 98 then it dies when trying to load the O.S. for the first time now give me a copy of XP please
Get home and install XP - SWEET
Did a Google on NDIS and Microsoft has pages on it. This failure is fairly common on WIN 98 SE and there is a patch for it but what good is it if you can't get into the O.S. to load it and besides I don't have SE.
I think this sort of thing will happen more and more as 98 is less supported and hardware manufacturers concentrate there efforts on being compliant with XP onwards.
So much for a simple upgrade but damn it hums now, 3D 2001 score of 13,200 against an old score of 6,500 with the same Ti 4800 SE graphics card. ( Nothing is overclocked )
Needless to say the boy is stoked and his older brother is gutted as it blows away his Athlon 1800 XP.