View Single Post
Old 03-01-2004, 10:56 AM   #1
philip
Galvatron
 

Join Date: June 24, 2002
Location: aa
Posts: 2,101
I've got a problem here, and I'm not sure where to start as there are a few things I think might be bad now.

A few weeks ago I installed a wireless PCI card (+antenna). The network is working fine. Since I installed the card I get random reboots. I have above the minimum specs for the card so there's no problem there. I have found out that some programs are running when the reboots occur.

-streaming music with winamp, other programs are OK and don't do anything.
-Norton Internet Security
-Norton Antivirus autoprotect (the always on one)

Other programs are OK. I have tried to find out if it was because of system resources getting too low. However it didn't seem to be so. One time I got a log from system monitor and it never went above 70% CPU usage. Neither system or CPU are over-heating, both temperatures being around 30 degrees Celsius at most.

I tried to crash the PC myself but that wouldn't work. It only got really slow but in the end did everything OK. Think about NWN + toolset, a load of sites loading, trillian and word processing at the same moment all opened as fast as possible.

The reboots are really random. They can be either right on reboot while loading windows, after a few minutes of streaming or after hours of streaming, or after hours of being on. Could it be I have too little RAM to run these programs extra (128 MB)

Just a few minutes ago I had such a reboot again but this time in the POST there was 'primary hard disk failed' error message. After taking of the current and rebooting it worked again. I don't have really important stuff on it now or it's backed up luckily [img]smile.gif[/img]

Could the problem I have already above be caused by a failing hard disk? Should I take this error seriously? So could my hard disk be dying? I'm going to do a scandisk it right now.

I don't know if this could be important info but a format I did before installing the network card didn't went so good. I had a lot of crashes in the install and for some time windows would be only running in safe mode, because drivers were suddenly deleted. Also because the antenna of the wireless network has better signal if it's out of the way of any other cables behind my computer I decided to take the card down a few PCI slots. After one of those I got an annoying sort of sirene going of. One high beep and then a lower and repeated till I switched of the computer. After putting the card in again this was solved, though it might not be caused by the card itself.

My system is 3 years old but performed really well.

Windows ME
733 mHZ PIII
Asus AX 34 motherboard
128 MB RAM
32 MB NVidia TNT 2

Also since I haven't had trouble with ME for 3 years I'd like to keep it if possible, unless the fun starts only with internet installed. Further I could put in some more RAM but I won't be changing much as it's still good enough for me. And this isn't about new hardware but just fixed the problem but I thought I just post all the specs in case they're needed/give specific errors/were part of the problem.
philip is offline