New Motherboard Problems

[integra]

I installed my new Abit NF7-S board today. Everything works ok, but i've found that from time to time things will become very slow and jerky. When playing music, the music will skip and briefly stop playing. I can't figure out why this is happnening. Any ideas? Would my using the onboard sound rather than my Audigy card have anything to do with this?

[hobey19]

i am not quite sure what would be causing your problem, but i can assure you that it is not a cause of using onboard sound.

the only thing that i would look at is to make sure DMA is enabled on your drives. to do this, right click on my computer, go to properties, then hardware, then device manager. go to the IDE line, and double click on the IDE entry where your HD is located, and then go to advanced settings. make sure that for Transfer Mode, DMA if Available is enabled on both devices. do this for the other IDE entry as well.

craig

[integra]

DMA is enabled on both entries. Any other suggestions? Thanks :)

[integra]

I'm not sure if this is it but...

This bit of software called "SATARaid" was something the manual told me to install after installing the drivers for the board. I disabled it and the system seemed to speed up again. Can someone explain what this is? And is it neccessary?

[antgross@pacbell.net]

Where are your speaker plugged into? If they're in the sound card, then you should disable your sound on the motherboard. YOu can do this by going into your bios and disabling sound codecs etc.

[integra]

Well I had them plugged into the soundcard but I got no sound. So I moved it over to the motherboard's sound input bit and got some decent onboard sound. I've just taken my soundcard out now cos the motherboard doesn't like it.

[antgross@pacbell.net]

Well, I think you have conflicts because the sound card and motherboard are trying to use the same resources. As I said, if you want to use the sound card you should disable the sound on the motherboard, then reinstall sound card and drivers. Otherwise, you may want to disable the sound card instead-assuming you want to use mobo for your speakers. What kind of sound does your mobo support? 8-channel, eg.?

[integra]

As far as I can see, it has 6 channel sound.

[antgross@pacbell.net]

That's essential dolby 5.1. I guess you need to figure out which(mobo or sound card) sounds better and go with one or the other.

[integra]

I'm going with the onboard for now. I'm planning on picking up a front mounting soundcard later on.

[Hags]

I'm not sure if this is it but...

This bit of software called "SATARaid" was something the manual told me to install after installing the drivers for the board. I disabled it and the system seemed to speed up again. Can someone explain what this is? And is it neccessary?

SATA Raid is a method of connecting and transfering data between your mobo and hard drives, the easiest way to tell if you are using SATA (Serial ATA) is the connections, the SATA cables are very thin and small compared to your normal ATA cables (I.E ribbon cables). So if you are connecting your hard drives to your motherboard with ribbon cables, then you are not using SATA and do not have to have it installed

[integra]

Thanks Hags, guess I don't need it then. I've since found out it wasn't the problem tho.

Another thing I've noticed... When I go to download something I click the "save to disk" button and the window will go blank and stay blank for 20 or 30 seconds before telling me it is downloading. This is annoying cos for the most part it runs fine, it's just occasionally it locks up for 30 seconds.

[integra]

Anoher thing I've noticed...sometimes the computer won't boot all the way up into Windows. It'll go through all the black screen stuff and then will stay at a black screen with a flashing hyphen at the top left. Any other ideas?

[Tin]

did you remember to do a comlplete reformat of your hard drive? if you didnt, im absolutely positive you have crap left over from your A7V333 motherboard on that hard drive. one of the most essential rules....ALWAYS reformat your hard drive after a new motherboard install. if you didnt format your hard drive, im sure its the reason why your system is running so sluggish.

[integra]

Yup, I reformatted the drive after I put in the new board. It's as if some sort of memory intensive program runs for a minute every now and then. It's really strange as for the majority of the time, Windows seems to perform really well.

[integra]

I noticed this earlier on today. Whenever the computer slows or stops for a while, one of the icons on the desktop changes symbol.

Since I've just reformatted i'm having to download my old software off my P2P software (Ares). Everynow and again the icon for the software i'm downloading will change to a standard EXE style icon, and will then change back to the icon it is supposed to be. During this time windows slows down and halts for a few seconds.

I used to have a similar problem to this before I installed the new board where all of the icons on the desktop would disappear and then come back one by one, again slowing down the systems performace as it was doing so.

Another thing which I noticed today. When botting up, it gets to the XP loading screen with the green bar, then it goes to a blank black window and stays there for 15 seconds before starting windows. It used to go straight to windows.

Any suggestions?