New build nightmare!

[teemro]

Ok, so I built my new pc - nothing difficult in that, spend a few years fiddling around with computers and all will be ok, ok? Hmm, not quite. What I built, and now running Win98, is a crasher.

What is doing the crashing is an explorer window. Infact, as I wrote this line, the browser crashed!!! Arghhhhhhhhhhhhh!

I got myself an Asus A7N8X deluxe mobo, with Athlon 2200 XP CPU and heatsink fan. Stirred in 512mb DDR RAM. Added my old CDrom and CDRW. Used a FDD from who knows what origin. Bought a new 60GB HDD from, I think, Maxtor. Shoved it in a pretty looking silver painted case.

SO WHY DOES IT CRASH???!!!

I could upgrade to XP, and hey, am I missing something? Should I have put XP on in the first place?

Yours, in more ignorance than I knew I had, teemro.

Please help, someone with a brain is needed here...

[SHARKY]

I am also building a pc and intending to use my old win98 as an operating system. Should I invest in a copy of XP instead?

Intended System:
1)Casetek 1016 Midi ATX Case
2)60Gb IBM Deskstar 120GXP
3)Asus P4B533 (Skt478)
4)2.0Ghz Intel P4 Retail (Skt 478-Northwood)
5)64Mb ATI Radeon 9000 RTL (Connect 3D)
6)256Mb DDR (PC2100) 266
7)Sound Blaster Audigy Player OEM
8)56x Aopen CDROM Retail
9)SamSung SyncMaster 710s Monitor
10)Compaq Keyboard
11)Microsoft IntelliMouse
12)Typhoon Sound System.

[ktkendall]

Hi teemro;

"I could upgrade to XP, and hey, am I missing something? Should I have put XP on in the first place?"

What OS are you running?? what version of IE, how did you go about loading it?? (ie. boot from cd or boot floppy using FDISK) Without more info on your software and how you installed it, can't tell you much, 1 thing comes to mind is if you have all drivers loaded, like the motherboard drivers from the disk that came with MOBO. Start windows into safe mode and see if crashing persists. Sounds like software related problem though, so shouldn't be hard to fix. Please post back with software info.
KK

[teemro]

Hi KK

I have here a Win98 Disc that says 'Second Edition'. I reckon that's a couple of years old. How I loaded it:

I got my new HDD and ran fdisk after putting in a Win98 boot disk. So I fdisked the hdd, and the CDrom was in the drive. Went from there.

As for the mobo. I didn't realise that I would have to load the various drivers (LAN/Sound/etc) after I had installed everything, but that's pretty much what I did.

Anyhow, then I ended up with the sytems crashing. Usually within IE , by the way, I have version 5 that came on the CDrom I have.

So should I be using a higher upgrade version of Win98, or should I put XP on? Or should I be doing something else?!

Look forward to hearing from you.

teemro

[Confused]

There are many things that can cause a system to fail. Heat, power (faulty power supply), incorrect setup, missing drivers to name a few.

Installing XP probably will not solve the problem of system crashing. When you talk about crash;

Does the system lock up?
Get a blue screen?
Will a simple reboot get it going or does it require a power cycle?

Chas

PS
WIN98SE properly setup is a excellent system. I have a WIN98FE I built with the help of this forum 3 years ago that is rock solid.

[teemro]

Hi Confused

Yes, blue screens (vxds) and just simply locking up - often within IE5 Explorer windows.

Just stops, and hey, I have to reboot all over... Sheeesh, maybe I should have gone to PC Planet afterall!

Any more ideas?

I'm interested that your experience of Win98 is positive.

teemro

[SARGE]

Did it start this from the beginning, or after you were running for a few days? Is it mainly while using IE? You can reboot but immediately begin tapping F8 so you get options for Safe Mode, etc. Select Command Prompt Only and do these one at a time:

Type........


a. del c:\*.swp (may get file not found message) is ok!
b. del c:\windows\*.swp
c. deltree c:\windows\temp\*.* (answer yes to all, ALL)
d. attrib c:\windows\shelli*.* -s -h -r
e. del c:\windows\shelli*.*

Reboot and see what happens.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Then I'd run the IE repair tool and System File Checker (SFC). To run the tool in Control Panel select Add/Remove Programs then select Internet Explorer and opt to add/remove. A dialogue box should pop up; select repair. If it's not there, Mickey says:

"If the Internet Explorer Repair Tool Verification does not work, or if Internet Explorer 5 is not listed in the Add/Remove Programs tool in Control Panel, you may be able to start the Internet Explorer Repair tool from a command prompt:
Click Start, and then click Run.
In the Open box, type the following command, and then click OK:

rundll32 setupwbv.dll,IE5Maintenance "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\Setup\SETUP.EXE" /g "C:\WINDOWS\IE Uninstall Log.Txt"

NOTE: This command is case sensitive.
If you need to replace a bad file from the original Internet Explorer or Windows media, use either the System File Checker (SFC) tool or the Extract tool to extract the file. For information about these tools, view the following articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base.
SFC


185836 Description of the System File Checker Tool (Sfc.exe) "

[teemro]

Sarge

Seems to affffect IE5 only. Have been using Outlook Express without fault. Only thing is that I couldn't link from Outlook to IE link for some reason.

I'll try your suggestions now.

Thanks for the time being!

teemro

[Redo40]

Try upgrading IE to 5.5, it has 128-bit encryption which is something you will want anyway. Keep us posted.

[Cricket]

Hi teemro,

What are your IRQ assignments? Is your modem or NIC sharing it's IRQ with another device?

Have you tried swapping out the RAM yet?

Cricket

[teemro]

Hi Cricket

I haven't checked the IRQ assignations. I have only one stick of RAM (512kb) so cannot try that. I'm going to load IE 6 tonight when I get home, and see if that helps. I think someone in an earlier reply said about this really only affecting IE so I'll try that next.

Thanks.

[teemro]

Hi once more.

Well, I loaded up IE6, and, to be frank, there is a change but not really for the better. Sure, IE doesn't seem to crash as much, but I get new 'faults'. Such as some of the characters in the browser come out as rectangles and the like.

At one point, I don't just get blues screens of death with fatal exceptions and vxd errors being 'called' from somewhere or other, but I get white boxes with error messages in them (such as Explorer caused ... fault, c hoose Ignore/Close.

I have to add that I did have Medal of Honor installed, and it never ran properly, so I uninstalled it and there MIGHT have been an improvement.

Oh dear, any more ideas? Someone said in an earlier reply to my mailing that simply upgrading to XP wasn't necessarily a more dependable OS. But then, why is the Athlon XP2200 cpu advertised as such - is it designed for better working with XP rather than Win98?

Any final ideas appreciated.

Tim.

[mike breck]

Hi teemro,

Have you updated your Geoforce drivers and installed DX8.1?

When you loaded your motherboard drivers from the CD-Rom, did the setup make it quite clear that you were loading the Win9x drivers as opposed to W2K/XP drivers?

While we're at it, is DMA enabled for for your HD and optical drives?

Go to Device Manager
Click the plus sign next to the Disk Drives
Right-click on the drive and go to properties.
Click on the Settings tab.
Click the checkbox next to DMA, ignore the warning that pops up, and reboot.

[teemro]

Mike

I have loaded GEForce drivers. Indeed, when I loaded Medal of Honor, there is a requirement to upgrade to DX8.1.

When loading drivers from Motherboard CDrom I only loaded Win98 drivers. I didn't find it easy to load drivers from the motherboard CDrom in a general way; it kept asking for the Win98 disk and then said it couldn't find such and such a file.

I cannot comment on the DMA for the hard drive as I am not with the machine right now. I'll take a look tonight.

I suppose some of my problems may stem from the installtion of the motherbopard, and particularly the drivers.

Thanks.

[edge345]

Fisrt things first did you install the new via4in1 drivers, if not then go to this site and install them....

http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=2

[teemro]

Hi edge

What is the purpose of these via drivers?

...

[edge345]

These drivers are for your mother board, these are the updated drivers for a via chipset ( your motherboard has a via chipset).

It fixes a lot of different issues....

[teemro]

Ok, thanks, I'll give it a go tonight.

Very many thanks edge...

[edge345]

Windows 98 does not have the drivers built in....

windows has some versions of the via4in1 built in....

winxp is a more stable system, but if you plan on playing a lot of old games some games might not work with winxp, check out the game maker sites to see if all your favorate games are compatible with winxp....

[Cricket]

Hi teemro,

I'd still check for IRQ sharing and resource conflicts.

Hit and hold the Windows key (between the Ctrl and Alt keys) and then hit the Pause/Break key...that brings up the System Properties box. Click on the Device Manager tab and then click on the Properties box (the Computer icon at the top of the tree should be highlighted by defaulty). You should see your IRQ assignments...are there any sharing of IRQ's between devices?

Cricket

[mike breck]

The A7N8X uses NVidia motherboard drivers and not Via drivers

teemro,

Forget the Via drivers. Your mobo has an NVidia Northbridge and Southbridge i.e. an NVidia chipset.

edge345 has confused your mobo with the Asus A7V8X which does use Via drivers.

Try reinstalling the Asus motherboard drivers and checking your IRQs as Cricket suggested. Copy and paste them into Notepad and then paste them into your Post here.

I must tell, if you were experiencing crashes in other applications apart from IE, then I would suspect the Ram you have installed.

There is a lot of generic, unbranded DDR Ram flying around, and with a quality, high performance motherboard like the A7N8X, I would use high-quality Ram from Crucial

http://www.crucial.com/uk/

If you are not using the onboard NICs (I believe this motherboard has two - one by 3Com and one by NVidia), then disable them in the BIOS. In fact, go thro the BIOS with a fine toothcomb and disable any "added features" that you are not using at the moment.

HTH

[teemro]

Thanks Mike

Looks like I'll be checking the IRQs when I get home - thing is, aren't IRQs meant to be shared? At startup, you can see many IRQs seem shared between resources.

I noticed when trying to start Medal of Honor that the modem would try dialling a connection - I suppose maybe because I had installed GameSpy. That's why I uninstalled Medal of Honor.

Thanks for the warning re the via files.

[mike breck]

Yes,

but some devices share on some IRQs better than others.

What Cricket was really asking about is Resource conflicts. If two devices are conflicting on the same IRQ, then the devices "tend" to have a yellow exclamation in Device Manager. So that's what your looking for - any signs of conflict or a devices being disabled (red X).

To be honest, if I were in your situation, I would wipe the HD, FDISK and Format again, reinstall Win98SE, then the motherboard drivers, DX, and video drivers.

BTW which brand and model is your video card?

[teemro]

Mike

My video card is an Nvidia GeForce2 Ti200 that I bought some time back.

I guess I could scratch everything and start again... Then again, I seemed to have so much trouble getting drivers off the motherboard cdrom. What a pain.

It should be so easy - but the installation software always seems to want the Win98SE disc over and over - I mean moments after inserting the motherboard disc (or whatever)!

I've never known anything different, so I suppose it's normal.

If you have any further ideas, I'll be in your debt.

And thanks to cricket/edge/ktkendall/sarge and the others for their help in this - it is really appreciated.

Tim.

[edge345]

Thanks for corecting my post Mike Breck.

Installation :

It's here that the nForce2 falls over in my view. To begin with it appears the only way to get a foolproof installation is with a complete format and OS reinstall. Now personally I'm all in favor of that approach anyway but not everybody is going to want the hassle! There's also a problem currently with NVIDIA's IDE drivers and at this precise moment in time the theoretical approach is to disable APIC in the BIOS prior to installing the nForce drivers then popping along and enabling it again. I say theoretically because it doesn't work, at least it doesn't work for me. The drivers went in fairly easily followed by the manual installation of the USB 2.0, network and IDE drivers. This again went smoothly until it was time to enable APIC and boot again. This time the boot was abruptly halted by a WindowsXP stop error. I tried this procedure several times but XP wasn't having any of it so in the end I had no option but to run with the standard Windows IDE drivers. It would seem to me that APIC needs to be disabled prior to the installation of the actual operating system but my instructions were to disable it prior to loading the nForce2 drivers which clearly doesn't work.

The next problem was also IDE related. Despite working quite happily together on our Epox 8K3A+ the ASUS board was simply not prepared to let me run our CD-RW as a master on the secondary IDE channel. All our hard drives would run there but not our CD-RW although it performed perfectly set as a slave on the primary IDE channel. Possibly just one of those things but certainly something I'd have liked a little more time to be certain of.

Here's a link to the sourse of the above....

http://www.3dvelocity.com/reviews/nforce2/nforce_5.htm

[teemro]

Hello again edge

I note what you say about APIC( although I don't fully understand your point), but that's no matter now.

But how does this problem affect IE? Even now as I type I am getting squares instaed of characters!

Arghh! Web pages aren't the same!

[mike breck]

Well, you can eliminate the need for having to use the Win98SE CD by copying the Win98 folder with all the CAB files (they look like WinZip files) from the CD to the HD. Every time it asks for the CD just, point it to the location of the Win98 folder on the HD.

Make sure the AGP card is firmly in the AGP Pro slot and that the tab is still in place. You only remove the tab if you are using an AGP Pro card. Try reseating the card a few times to make sure it is firmly seated. Make sure the rear end of the card doesn't rise up when the backplate of the cards is screwed down to the case.

The way things are going, I would just wipe the HD and start over again - Win98, IE 6, mobo drivers, DX, video drivers.

It could just be a bad Windows, mobo drivers, or IE installation.

Monitor each stage very carefully and see where the problem begins - if it does, second time round. Pay particulat attention to the mobo driver installation.

Try it the normal way the installer want's to do it.

Then if you still get the same problem, Format the HD and this time, if the driver installer asks you to reboot, then don't let it. Wait until all the drivers are installated and then reboot.
See if that helps.

I would wipe the HD several times over, if necessary, to detect the problem or try and get a good install.

However, I still have question mark against your Ram.

HTH

[Cricket]

Originally posted by teemro Looks like I'll be checking the IRQs when I get home - thing is, aren't IRQs meant to be shared? At startup, you can see many IRQs seem shared between resources.

Win9x doesn't share IRQ's too good, so it's recommended that you try to give each device it's own IRQ.

Win2000 and WinXP handle sharing of IRQ's between devices much better than Win9x. The ACPI in Win2000 and WinXP functions much better than the one in Win9x, so IRQ sharing is possible.

Cricket

[GaryRouth]

Hi all

Figured I'd throw in a reply for moral support.

. . . and remember that you're gaining valuable experience, even when it requires Aspirin!

By the way: just in case you do want to check your hardware, Powermax should have come with the Maxtor hard drive: you can use it to test the drive & IDE transfers. DocMemory at http://www.simmtester.com can test the memory for you.

Lots of folks love the motherboard you have. Here's a link to the amdmb forum thread for recent builds using that board:
http://www.amdforums.com/showthread.php?threadid=171561
I did notice that most of them are using either Win2k or WinXP. That thread is just one of many for your board, by the way - and there are a couple that deal with system freezes due to memory timing issues (but these guys are hardcore overclockers).

Your Asus has the newer nForce2 chipset. The older, first generation nForce chipsets had some rough spots to watch for: their drivers for Win98 were originally not as good as the Win2k/XP drivers, and there were things to watch for such as how many sticks of memory were used, and what slots they were in. The MSI boards, for example, ran best with the RAM in memory slots 1 and 3. Another odd thing was that those early boards were said to run better with Ati video cards as add-ins, than nVidia's own line of cards. The thread for your nForce2 Asus board is so long that I didn't notice anyone talking about placement of the memory sticks, or video card issues . . . but then I figured I could read all night (they are up to 60 pages of posts just in that one thread - that's one hot-selling board right now).

From what I've read so far, that system should fly once you get it stable. Enjoy
. . . Gary

[osequi]

Could the fact that he is using an older video card have any negative effect on the system?

osequi