A-Open Shuts Me Down
Long story made short(er):
My daughter came to visit for the week. She just graduated HS. Being Daddy's Girl she brought her computer for some tweaking. Unfortunately, a tragic accident occured, killing her MB.
I felt so bad I rushed right out and bought her a new one from a local computer store. The only choice available "right now" was an A-Open AK77-8XN.
Feature-wise, it is not a bad board, but I have never been a big fan of A-Open. (Not trying to start a fight, just that at a previous job my dummy boss bought practically nothing but A-Open parts for the repair department.)
It was a battle just getting XPhome installed (for example: the easiest part of the installation was phoning MS for activation:rolleyes2 ).
Now the SOB (can I say that here at S-M?) reboots randomly. Sometimes it lasts several hours, sometimes only minutes. Temps are not great, but OK (no OC'ing). I have updated the bios, fiddled with memory timings (768MB Mushkin PC2700), and tried backing everything down to granny speed. Gave CPU, AGP and Memory voltages a little kick, too. (With the system still at stock speeds).
Her computer was brand new at Christmas, and there is no antique hardware in it. It also has a month-old 350W PS which gave no trouble in the system before her MB was killed. (Don't Ask...) Her CPU is a 2100+.
I am almost certainly going to order her a new board from newegg, but I would like to get this sucker going, if at all possible. I'll probably use it in a new Folding computer someday.
Any advice, especially from anyone with previous experience with A-Open, would be helpful. Commiseration and pity are fine, too.
Prof:banghead:
My daughter came to visit for the week. She just graduated HS. Being Daddy's Girl she brought her computer for some tweaking. Unfortunately, a tragic accident occured, killing her MB.
I felt so bad I rushed right out and bought her a new one from a local computer store. The only choice available "right now" was an A-Open AK77-8XN.
Feature-wise, it is not a bad board, but I have never been a big fan of A-Open. (Not trying to start a fight, just that at a previous job my dummy boss bought practically nothing but A-Open parts for the repair department.)
It was a battle just getting XPhome installed (for example: the easiest part of the installation was phoning MS for activation:rolleyes2 ).
Now the SOB (can I say that here at S-M?) reboots randomly. Sometimes it lasts several hours, sometimes only minutes. Temps are not great, but OK (no OC'ing). I have updated the bios, fiddled with memory timings (768MB Mushkin PC2700), and tried backing everything down to granny speed. Gave CPU, AGP and Memory voltages a little kick, too. (With the system still at stock speeds).
Her computer was brand new at Christmas, and there is no antique hardware in it. It also has a month-old 350W PS which gave no trouble in the system before her MB was killed. (Don't Ask...) Her CPU is a 2100+.
I am almost certainly going to order her a new board from newegg, but I would like to get this sucker going, if at all possible. I'll probably use it in a new Folding computer someday.
Any advice, especially from anyone with previous experience with A-Open, would be helpful. Commiseration and pity are fine, too.
Prof:banghead:
0
Comments
It´s probably not a PSU problem, PSU problems get you freezes when the voltages isn´t right, not reboots.
Can you make sure to DISABLE any overheating protections in bios, try another fan header for the cpu-fan.
How´s the system temps?
Mac
Reboot usually occurs right as you click on something. It could be anything, but IE seems to be a popular one to conk out on, like when you open a link. The statistics may be skewed on this topic, since using the internet is her big deal. It has been Folding since Friday (though I did shut that down occasionally for troubleshooting purposes); last night I ran Norton Speed Disk on all four partitions. It does not seem to reboot overnight.
All overheating protection is disabled. I'll try another fan header this afternoon.
System temps are low 50's under full load (including F@H). I know that will make some of you cringe.
I was able to copy about 80GB's of mp3's and vids (Star Trek TV shows, etc, some were very large files) without a glitch.
Thanks,
Prof
Finally, 50*C? YEEEEEEOWCH! I should point out that ALL of the systems I recommend to people, whether they're overclocked or not, have upgraded cooling systems... It sounds to me like that one needs upgrading...
Click on the "Advanced" tab then "Settings" in "Startup & Recovery"
Find the checkbox that says "Automatically restart" -- make sure it's unchecked. This option bypasses the BSOD and restarts...
Good Luck..
Let us know if that leads anywhere...
In that bios, is there an option for Apic 1.4 enable/disable?
If it is enabled and windows is instaled pure default, its installed with ACPI and mixing Apic 1.4 and ACPI isn´t a picnic. They are supposed to do the opposite to eachother. Apic enables all irq´s and ACPI get you 1 irq where all peripherals share it. I have had this problem before.
The other hardware (Video card, memory, and CPU) was in the old board when it died. I wonder if the old MB might have taken something out with it. In addition, my daughter has to go back home today (work tomorrow), so future board replacements will have to wait a week or two and will involve at least one 200+ mile round-trip for me. If I could just get this thing reasonably stable now, it would allow me to change out the board at a more convenient time. If I was rich (and could have found another board locally) I would have done that.
Good suggestion. I will definitely do this.
Nope, no Apic 1.4 options. I will explore the ACPI lead, though. A bios update helped (that's how I was able to get windows installed to begin with), and the new bios does allow some ACPI tinkering.
I appreciate everyone taking their time to offer suggestions. With the new ideas you have given me I hope to at least reduce the problem somewhat.
Prof:)
The fact that you're describing problems which only occur when you are running memory intensive applications like IE etc etc, indicates that a memory failure is a real possibility, especially since you've had the modules out whilst changing to the new board.
So, I urge you to test your memory before you do anything else.
Running it now.
Thanks.
Prof
Unfortunately, I did not have time to finish all of the diagnostics I wanted to run.
There is good news (knock wood). When I built her computer last December as a Christmas present, I originally installed 256MB of Mushkin PC2700 ram. In May I added another 512MB (2 X 256MB) of what was supposed to be the same ram. All of the memory was ordered from Newegg, who only described it as I indicated above. The new 512MB had a different color heat sink on the chips, and a different Newegg stock number. On a whim, I removed the original 256MB chip. After that things seemed to run OK, though I wasn't able to run the computer long enough for me to feel absolutely sure I had found the problem. Still feeling whimsical, I put the oddball chip back in - the problem resurfaced almost immediately. She's running the computer now with just the two 256MB matching chips. All three chips worked fine in the MSI board that kicked the bucket. If she has no problems for the next week or so I will declare victory and buy you all a beer. If not, I'll keep plugging away. Right now I'm feeling a lot better.
One other thing I noticed is that two of the ram slots on the board are so close that they are almost touching, the third slot is just a little farther away from the other two. There is nothing in the documentation to suggest that there is any difference between the slots. The manual merely says to use non-ECC ram, 1GB max per slot, 3GB max total. It does make me wonder though.
She's coming back to visit again in a few weeks, which will give me the opportunity to fiddle around with it some more.
Thanks to everyone for your excellent suggestions - especially Spinner, who put me on the memory testing path.
Prof
(Older, wiser, and fingers crossed;) )
Cheers
Thanks to all for helping.
Prof
It was probably a case of the new board not likeing a combination of different types of memory modules (presuming the new modules you bought were in fact different to the ones you already had in there), where as the old board could handle the differential. The module probably still works fine, but like I originally said, you'll need to test it to confirm that.
Glad it's running nicely again.
SPINNER