On Thu, 22 Apr 2004 03:04:01 GMT, "Deadman Struttin" wrote:
Thanks for your post and suggestions. It took a bit of time to find
the answers to your questions, and I'm not sure of all, but here's
what I "think" I know:
snip
A few questions for you. 1)What size & brand power supply.
It's an Antec case with an Antec 400w supply.
2)What mobo revision number.
Not sure of this. I checked the board and there is a barcode sticker
on one edge (at the PCI slots) and it has a long number ending with v
1.1, so I'm guessing that this is the revision number.
3)Did you have four drives setup in it before this
configuration.
Yes, for about a year, but with the addition of a WD 160 GB drive
and the Promise controller packaged with it, it's been a "different" 5
drives. But the board ran fine with the additionl Promise controller
for several months before this flakyness started.
4)Do you have a Soundblaster audio card in it?
Yes I do, its a SoundBlaster 128 PCI card.
My personal experiance with this board has been that it's a power hungry
peice of work, with somewhat questionable circuitry actually suppling the
power where needed (especially the AGP port). I have the rev 1.0 though. I
ended up with a Antec 550w to power it adequetly, but only have 1 WD HD and
a CD-RW.
Now this could be an issue! I recently (within a couple of months)
added a Lite-on CDRW drive. (I also have a Plextor 12/10/32A that I've
had for a long time) and an LG CD-ROM. The problems started happening
at about the time I tried burning CD's in both burners at the same
time. As I recall, the system locked up..... but I haven't tried that
since, and the system is still getting lockups unrelated to burning.
However, could the extra burner be drawing enough power to cause a
problem even when it's idle? I'll try disconnecting it completely, and
see if I can still cause a lockup in Photoshop.
Some peolpe had issues with HD's attached to the secondary IDE
channel in conjunction with using a Soundblaster card. Paul Howland's FAQ
over at Sudhian covers this :
http://www.sudhian.com/showfaqs.cfm?fid=2&fcid=15#217 . There were also
reports of problems transfering large data files between IDE channels, some
linked to SB audio, some not. There was a PCI latency patch put out by
George Breese which I've used every since I found it, and havn't encountered
any problems with large file transfers. It's at :
http://www.georgebreese.com/net/software/#PCI .
As I mentioned earlier, I've had both the SB card and HDs on the sec
IDE before, and not seen the problem.
Last thing I can think of
that may help is adjusting the PCI latency values for any other peripherals
with PowerStrip. Link to an article discussing that is here :
http://www.geocities.com/phileosopho...cilatency.html .
I'll definitely look into this, and post back if I find this has any
effect.
Again, thanks for your suggestions. I tried a few things suggested
yesterday by Jim, such as making sure all the defaults were set in the
BIOS. The only effect that I noted was that the default set my
processor speed back to 750 MHz. It's a 1 GHz processor that I'd been
running at 1 GHz, so that somewhat surprised me. Although I've only
had "one" lockup since then, I don't think the lower processor speed
is the reason, as I've sometimes gone a day without a lockup... it
just seems to depend on what I'm doing. I'll continue testing for a
bit more, then reset the speed back to 1 GHz and test again.
Charlie Hoffpauir
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~charlieh/