Posts by Chaky

If you have another operating machine, you could try to bypass the initial phase of windows installation (one that requires booting from CD). What you can do is:

- disconnect the HD on your 2nd machine and connect the HD from the 1st one in it.
- start installing windows until it reboots. Before it continues installing Windows, shut down your 2nd machine and reconnect the HDs way they were before.
- now your 1st machine should continue with installation.

BIOS settings tend to get lost and reset to defaults after prolonged period of motherboard being unplugged from the power source. Keep in mind one thing that can render Windows XP unbootable:
ACPI/APIC setting (usually has option of disable or enable) is crucial. If it differs from the setting by the time Windows was installed it will not boot. Not even in safe mode.

BTW, you failed to mention where that gray cable is coming from. Usually those wires are marked. (HDD Led, PWR, Reset, Speaker, Keylock...)

In my experience, taking the PC apart and cleaning it usually end up with same situation that you're in. Sometimes everything goes back to normal by itself after some resting time (for both you and your machine). Sometimes you need to do is reseat the VGA and PCI cards and re-check the wiring.
Few times I plugged 40-wire IDE cable upside down by mistake. It doesn't matter which end goes where or the orientation of the pin 1, as long as it is same on both ends. If you flip over one end and plug it in, then none of the drives would spin, no VGA output, no beeps, no nothing. Just like your machine...

For the black and white gunk (otherwise, known as thermal paste) definitely YES. Clean the back of the heatsink and front of the CPU and apply very thin layer of the "white gunk".

It is not overheating CPU, since it needs time to heat up and eventually overheat, by which time your PC would behave as usual. Even then, your CPU would do emergency slowdown, and no harm would be done. That's one good thing about Intel CPUs.

In case you dismembered all of the components, it is a possibility that you haven't seated all of the RAM sticks properly and/or PCI/PCI-e cards. I suspect that your VGA is not seated properly and thus producing no video feedback. That is why every mobo should have beeper implemented.

Regarding that LED2... it could be some kind of warning. Bad power connection, faulty RAM, faulty CPU.... even "case open warning". Whatever that is, it should be in your mobo manual. I tried to find that mobo (given that INTEL A-OPEN #AX4SG-N is the model of the mobo), but no luck. A-OPEN homepage is in Japanese and my Japanese is, kind of, rusty.

Couple of things you should know about vacuuming the PC:
dust itself has capacitor of static charge proprieties and combined with vacuuming (or any kind of breeze) it can discharge and harm sensitive electronic parts, and with RAM being the most sensitive of them, it would be the first to go.

After wrapping my head around your problem I could think of several reasons why your machine shuts down on it's own:

- PSU - possibly the other PSU you tried does not produce enough juice to run your machine or it has similar power outlet problem like your original one. Bare in mind that PSU's power outlet decreases over age. If both are similar age and wattage, chances are that they will both have same "aging" problems.

- the silliest reason (and, somehow most likely) is the power cable of your machine, or the socket it is plugged in. Loose connection can cause mobo/CPU dying symptom, without any error reports/BSODs whatsoever.
Simply change the socket and/or the power cable to see if that's the case.

- motherboard or CPU failure - this is worst case scenario. No real way to eliminate one or the other unless you have spare CPU (which you don't), or spare mobo (yeah, right, you sure have extra one of those lying around)

- incompatible PCI card - I had a PCI modem that would cause shutdown every time I try to dial. Maybe you have some old or no-name PCI audio card with outdated drivers?

- weird RAM issues. I experienced similar behavior of my machine back when I was experimenting with overclocking. That would happen usually when I go overboard with MHzs. Countermeasure is to increase the RAM voltage, or to under-clock the RAM itself.
What you're …

There should be setting in BIOS for invoking network adapter ROM. Try disabling it.

Try renaming your Config.sys (or deleting it, if you will).

That "stacks=0,0" is probbably causing problems.
If there is no stacks command (or no config.sys), than it would be set on default values.

You hould change booting sequence in BIOS.

1-Hard disk
2-CD Drive
3-Network (a.k.a boot agent)

There should be some options regarding the setup BEFORE you buy a laptop. It is like buying a car, but not being able to open the trunk, unless you crush the car.

Speaking of laptops, about 3 years ago I stumbled on some shop that had 2 laptops displayed in the window:
- one was 2 GHz Intel P4 with the price of roughly 600 UK Pounds (normal price range)
- the other was 850 MHz PIII (I started laughing at the specs) OUTDATED, and the price was 1800 UK Pounds (the laughter seized at that point).

That's extreme, but truth.

I want to know what kind of a fool would buy THAT!

Friend of mine bought HP laptop (in US). Not a bad machine. 1/2 gig VGA, 19 inch wide screen... He got, I think, 4 recovery DVDs. Apart from no OS disks, all OK... BUT, the morons that installed Windows could've easily made it a really good machine if they utilized the fact that the laptop has 2 identical HDs and hooked them up in RAID0, but NOOOOoooo they partitioned them separately and took 20 Gigs on one of them for some sort of recovery partition, which are off bounds to him by default.. Stupid.

Couple of things are inevitable with PCs that slows them down:
- Registry becomes fragmented or full of past-installation leftovers
- HD becomes fragmented

Registry can be cleaned and defragmented using tool called "Free Registry Defrag" (among other free registry tools). It defragments and compacts the registry files.

For the HD, there is no simple solution.
Windows come packed with defragmenter, but that one is THE worst one there is. It takes forever and can only do partial defragmentation.
You need to understand the NTFS and it's architecture to understand the cause of the slow-down of your PCs overall performance.
Thing is, NTFS is consists of 3 major parts:
- MFT (Master File Table)
- metadata
- data (actual files and folders)

Windows defragmenter can defragment only the data (pagefile not included!). Rest remains fragmented and keep in mind that MFT and metadata affects everything on your PC (booting time, disk access time, reading time...)
I've discovered program called "PerfectDisk" (latest ver. is 8) and it is THE ONLY defragmenter (so far) that can handle all 3 on that list, with some extra boot-time boosting features. Most of the commercial defragmenters can handle MFT and pagefile, but NONE can handle metadata.
Only problem with PerfectDisk is that it takes long time to defragment the data. (MFT, pagefile and metadata are defragmented by so-called boot-time defragmentation, while data is defragmented regularly)
Quickest so far (regarding the data …

HP...
Hundred problems
Highly perishable
Handicapped product
Hangover paid-up
Hardware pandemonium
Hardcore pain

I'm out.

Q: Is RMA possible?

That can be caused by number of things.

1. Corrupted registry.
2. Corrupted files. (system or programs)
3. Dying hardware (HD, RAM, Mobo...)

You should try booting in safe mode (press and hold f8 while booting) and look in your event viewer (in "administrative tools" <- might be that you would have to check the "display administrative tools" in Start/settings/taskbar and start menu/start menu/customize). In the event viewer look for the entries with the time-stamp of your latest failed boot attempt, and look for the errors and/or alerts. If any, please post them.

Also, while you're at it, look in Control panel/system/hardware/device manager, and if any of the listed devices are marked with red cross (disabled) or yellow triangle (not started), please post that too.

Oh, yeah, Your hardware specs, please...

Your hardware list would provide some light. Sounds to me like hardware/driver issue.

If you want stability, you should increase RAM voltage. Some RAM (like GAIL) are power-hungry, and default voltage just isn't enough.

Couple of Q's:

Are there any errors logged in event viewer?

How high is your VGA temp?

Are all of your motherboard drivers installed?

Do you have any "unknown devices" or problematic devices in your device manager?

Did you try setting RAM timings manually?

Have you OCed your CPU?

Registry files can be restored manually via MS-DOS prompt. System.dat and user.dat (in windows directory) are current registry and system.da0 and user.da0 are backed up ones (every restart backs them up). Simply by replacing them you would restore your registry to the state it was when you last shut down/rebooted your machine properly.

I seriously doubt that shell32.dll is missing. Your system wouldn't run without it. It is probably not registered in your registry.
To fix this, simply type
regsvr32 "C:\Windows\System\shell32.dll" in your "run" menu. (or command-prompt), given that your windows reside in "C:\Windows".

I suggest that you do the search on other "missing" dlls and repeat the same procedure with them, keeping in mind correct paths and filenames of the dlls.

Also, keep in mind that some of missing files are related to software that is long gone. To fix that you will have to install and uninstall that software, so your windows wouldn't look for non-existing software any longer. If you're not sure what you have installed by the point you backed your registry, simply open Add/remove programs in control panel and read the list.

Please post your autoexec.bat, config.sys and msdos.sys. I will try to figure out the problem. Also, useful info would be your hardware (soundcard in particular).

PS To be able to see/read those 3 files you would have to check "show hidden files" in folder options.

PSU provides number of voltages: 12V and 5V for the peripherals LED lights, fans and so, 2-3V for the memory, 1.5V for the CPU core... and that is what I can give you from the top of my head (there are more). If you take out one of those voltages, you would get similar situation. Problem with laptop's, in some cases, the PSU is partly or fully integrated with the motherboard, so if it gives, you would have to replace the motherboard, or manage to find PSU that is intact (next to impossible) and have some electrician replace it for you, since it takes considerable soldering skills. In such case, you might want to consider chipping in some more $$$ and get a new (or 2nd hand and working) laptop, since the motherboards for laptops are only available at the laptop manufacturer, and since they charge you for it way too much.

BTW, only two ways to be sure if the PSU is to blame are:
- to have working PSU for the comparison or
- to have an expert analyze the problem.

Maybe not. I know that, couple of years ago, it was possible to order replaceable BIOS chip directly from Award, but I'm not so sure that it is still the case.

Yo should browse through thiese pages to see if you find something useful.

Also, there is a possibility of faulty adapter/PSU.

When you change heatsinks you MUST clean both surfaces on CPU and heatsink, and apply VERY THIN layer of thermal paste, and heatsink must be screwed or clamped on REAL TIGHT, otherwise the heat transmission from CPU to heatsink won't be sufficient to keep the CPU from overheating. That is why the smart thing to do is to closely monitor CPU temperature for couple of hours after heatsink change.

New CPU + heatsink (in a box) usually doesn't require any thermal paste, for the heatsink is equipped with fool-proof silicon (or something) and all you need is to fit them together. Not the case with customized CPU cooling.

If my Harddisk is connected with Motherboard , no any peripharal devices are working , but the prosessor and cabinet fan still running

If I understand correctly, when you connect HD to motherboard, all other peripherals stop working. That points to your HD. It is probably shorting out the IDE cable or the IDE cable itself is cracked. Third reason would be upside-down connection to your HD (possible to connect it that way if you have 40-pin cable with both sides flat, but highly unlikely).

Overheating message suggests that your CPU heatsink is loose or clogged with dust, or the fan isn't spinning, but have no fear for your CPU is well protected against overheating.

Questions:
You say that monitor, mouse and keyboard aren't working... What IS working?

Do you hear any beeps, and if so, what is the pattern of beeps (ex. 7 short beeps and one long means VGA failure)

The error Number was a 0x00000000a (not les or equal) that I figure was due to not having installed all the drivers

You're probably right, especially if you haven't installed motherboard drivers, but that kind of BSOD can go from anywhere to everywhere. Windows bug (resolved with SP2), dying hardware, lack of (or wrong) drivers... maybe even overheating CPU.

Regarding overheating, if it is Intel CPU, than you're safe. They have overheating protection (PIII and above). They slow down if it get too hot. If it is AMD, then you would want to check hardware monitoring in your BIOS, just to be sure if everything is OK. I don't mean checking temps, but checking if it is showing any, like CPU temperature diode, which tends to go first on overheated AMDs.

Do you remember the type of error, like "IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL" and the number that came before those you wrote down? I guess that those numbers that you wrote were inside parenthesis. One before that is the error code.

nothing is displaying on my monitor when i start up i have a raidion 9800 graphics card if that helps please help

Can you describe your PC's behaviour when you boot ti up? That will help me understand the problem you are having.

- do you hear any beeps?
- does the HD power up?
- is the PC booting as usual, only no video output?
- are the cable(s) well connected between PC and monitor?

For the first-aid, you should try reseating your VGA. (plug it out and back in)

Your configuration would be helpful information too.

You might need more power with all that, and don't believe every PSU declared power output. I also have 550 w PSU powering dozen of fans, 2 HDs, 1 optical, GeForce 7800 GT 512 M, 3 GHz AMD Athlon64, and when I run ASUS Probe (monitoring software), I see voltages up to 10% lower than usual. 12V line gave me a couple of alerts. I would imagine that if I added 4 more HDs that I would experience same problems you are experiencing.

I've heard a myth that BBC was selling extra because of game called "Elite"...

Well, that's what I've picked up while troubleshooting my problem. Maybe the lens itself is universal, but the technologies are too different to be compatible with single lens + optics. Allot of people have faulty DVD part of the burner, and they still can use CD part without any problems whatsoever. That is typical symptom of bad DVD lens (or something).

I've expanded mine to 2 Megs. Now I can see 1024*768 in 16 bit color depth, lol. (Trident 9440 VL) It has 2 memory chip slots for the extra memory. And to think of my current VGA with 512 megs...

My next step from C64 was AMD 486 @ 100 MHz, 8 Megs of ram 850 Megs HD and whole 1 meg videocard (Trident). only CPU is still in use from that machinery. Everything else died, except mobo. HD worked for 10 years, until my bro tried to plug in some VLB ISA IDE controller in the non-VLB ISA slot with HD attached to it.

... but the CPU stil works on "brand-new" PCI-slot mobo, Win 95, and bunch of old games...

2 MHz? That's fast....

...comparing to the C64 (1 MHz).

I had BBC emulator on my C64. (back in mid-80's)

Did you try creating another account? Maybe something got in the way when you created that one. AV software tends to control registry changes and they can block programs like account manager to do needed tasks properly.
I suggest that you get rid of that account and make a new one with AV software disabled.

If you are referring to blank title bar, you might have missing font. To check what font is assigned to taskbar, rightclick on the desktop, open properties, click on the appearance tab and click "advanced" button. There you can click on the title bar in the image and the font should read "Trebuchet MS" (that's default). Try changing to some other font to see if that would help.

I had a similar problem, only it was solved by reinstalling Windows and my "CD drive" was able to read DVDs (as they were 4.8 Gig CDs). I had no autoplay functionality in a sense of playing Audio CD's or DVD Movies. Only data CD/DVDs worked normally (autoplay). And it also registered as CD drive. I found that part of the problem was with windows registry regarding CD protocols. It was missing a service called "red book". ("Red book" is a name for audio CD standard) That is why I had to reinstall the windows.

You should have in mind that DVD drives have 2 sets of lenses. 1 for CDs and 1 for DVDs. It is possible that DVD lens is not working, got dirty or something, so your drive (old one) is being able to read CDs only. New one might be ripe for RMA if the case is the same.

If you have Nero at your disposal, there is a little utility called Nero Info tool. I believe that it is available for download as standalone program. It will display all of the capabilities of your drive, among other things, plus it bypasses windows drivers and settings.

Also, there are drivers (ASPI drivers - responsable for all CD/DVD reading and burning) that tend to get corrupted (overwritten) by some media player installations. There are tools (forceASPI, fixASPI...) that can fix those, but you would have to know your ways around PCs to be able …

You should re-seat your card. "Device test failed" means either your card is fried, not seated properly or the drivers are corrupt.

Reinstalling your drivers might solve it.

Feel free to post the log of Analysis and Advice tool and I'll see if there is anything I can do.

There are various memory testing software that you can try. Memtest86 would be my recommendation.

For the rest of the hardware I say try SiSoft Sandra. Lite version is free (evaluation). It has many features, including various benchmarks and Analysis and Advice feature that can help you speed up your PC. It detects hardware settings and such that slows down your PC.

Such extreme slow-down can be caused by number of things:

- underclocked CPU
- lack of free HD space (almost no HD space)
- viruses, trojans, adware, spywarwe...
- HD issues (dying HD, bad cable connections...) a.k.a. PC having hard time accessing and writing to the HD
- the list goes on

I suggest that you run the Hijackthis and post the log here.
You can do a little test by booting in the safe mode to see if the boot time is the same as normal mode. If it takes same amount of time or longer than it is pretty much hardware issue, since the safe mode loads only the most necessary drivers to keep the PC operational, but I doubt that this is the case.

Told you that changing drive letters causes problems.

The confusion with drive letters is caused by 500 Gig HD. It represents (another) primary partition on the system. By default, first letter (C) is assigned to first primary partition. Second one (D) is assigned to second primary partition (in your case 500 Gig HD). It used to be F, because it was added after first windows was installed, but when your attempted to install the windows again, it reorganized the drive letters, so you have C (1st disk primary partition) D (500 Gig HD) E (1st disk secondary partition)

Drive letters assignment can be changed by disk management.
For you to be able to choose drive F on your startup, you need to change D to F in your disk management. If it is occupied, you can simply change current F to something else, then change D to F.

Note: Changing drive letters can cause problems with installed software.

If I was you, I would install windows on drive C (no repairs, no formatting) and manually install mobo drivers (as, cancel any automatic driver installation upon 2nd reboot). And don't install/uninstall drivers in safe mode. That is a bad karma.

Manually reconstructing windows installation is next to impossible and only real solution is to install windows + manually install drivers (old school).

When I say "manually" I mean double-clicking the driver bundle from NVIDIA and such.

You obviously deleted (a.k.a. moved from C to F) most of the files on drive C, so the setup program isn't detecting any windows installations there. I don't know exactly what is setup program looking for (maybe it is just entries in boot.ini), but it obviously isn't there.
You need to disable the 500 GB HD. If you already have and the setup program is still prompting you to fix that, then unplug the cable of the 500 GB HD and try to install on C drive (or D, whichever you prefer). No need to format the drive.
There is a way to get it back, but you would need to remove both drives and plug them in another machine. Or you can copy them manually from the recovery console (hardly an option here).

BTW, no need to uninstall the drivers in the safe mode. Simple rollback would do.

You will have to disable 500 GB HD in BIOS. That way it wont try to repair it. You can also disable all HDs you have. Windows setup program can still install the windows correctly, only it wont detect any present installations.

P.S. Don't forget to re-enable them after the first reboot.

I guess the only real solution would be to somehow make the page width flexible to the page's contents, but that would mean make-over of the whole site...

You'll have to post the whole error message. Example:

STOP 0x000000D1, (0x0000002b, 0x00000002, 0x00000000, 0xEEEE1b01) IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL Kbdclass.sys

If the screen is all scrambled and laptop otherwise works as usual, then it is most defintly poor connection between layers and slots. I'll take that by "layers" you mean the very thin see-trough cables. The layers are tricky to plug in. They tend to bend.
I suggest that you clean them up with contact cleaner spray (both layers and slots). Don't use alcohol because it can cause further damage.

I'm pretty sure that the mud from the puddle dried up in all the wrong places.

Weired thing happens with those arrows... when I doubleclick them my right column becomes selected (here's the pic).
BTW, same is with the bottom-left corner.

Arrows won't work at all in my cp. They do work everywhere else.

I've saved the page and zipped it.

It is a design/layout bug. Cause might be the same or similar, but in your case it is in subscription list, and mine is in control panel. My subscription list is OK.

There ya go. Had to put it in the archive 'coz of 1280*1024 limit.
I think that the "LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL" is just too long. Looks like long words should be clipped, but aren't.

Not quite the same.
My subscription list looks OK.

Hmm.. I did glaze over the titles in this forum. None of them seemed related to the problem I'm experiencing.

My control panel is somewhat scrambled (pic) in IE7, Firefox and Opera.
Everything else seems OK.