I have been out of the loop for the last three days. My system was randomly hanging whenever I started making it sweat. I could kill it anytime I started up WarCraft III, but it would die when I was compiling or just starting a webapp.
Since I had just installed a new DVD burner, I thought maybe it was a driver issue. So, I tried to reinstall Windows. I couldn't get past the part where it copies the files to the harddrive. So, I bought some new RAM because that fixed the problem last time I encountered this situation. Reinstall of Windows went alright, but the system would lock up or reboot whenever I stressed it. It would reboot while running dxdiag. I had been googling for the answer for the past three days. I was starting to fear that I would have to replace my GA-7VAXP motherboard.
I got a hint from here and here that the problem could be related to power. So, I unplugged my new DVD burner and what do you know... WarCraft ran just fine! It seems that the VIA chipset based motherboards have a problem routing the juice to the parts that need it (can you say CPU?). So, my random reboots, sound looping, video locking problems were not in any way related to drivers or hardware malfunctions. It all came down to my power supply not being beefy enough to handle 1dvd player, 1 dvd burner, 1 cd burner a harddrive, a GeForce FX 5200, Athlon 2200 XP and 512MB RAM. All running on Windows XP. I hope this post helps some poor slup that has this problem in the future.
Posted by carl at July 6, 2003 01:19 AM
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