Hey all, a few months ago my pc started to crash randomly at various stages
during the boot process and sometimes a few minutes after windows had loaded
(up to 20 minutes in). I couldnt fix the problem, and was told that if it
crashed during BIOS then it was definatly a hardware problem. I notcied that
the graphics card was noisey, the motherboard fan occasionally stopped
spinning completely and that one of the pins on power supply connection to
the motherboard had turned black as if it had burnt.

To fix the problem today I got a new motherboard, a new graphics card and a
new power supply unit. The computer no longer fails during startup but every
so often it crashes, the screen goes black and I get a siren style sound for
a few seconds, then it shuts down.

New Specs:
Gigabyte 7VT600P-RZ (socket A) Motherboard
XFX Ge Force 6200 128MB DDR TV-Out/DVI (AGP) (PVT44ARAMG) Graphics card

It is the first time I have put a computer together by myself (but not the
first time I have been inside the computer upgrading and reconnecting various
hardware). I just noticed that in System Information it says "total physical
memory 512.00 MB" even though I only actually have 256MBs.

Other Specs:
256 DDR RAM
AMD Athlon 2009Mhz
Sound Blaster sound card

One thing that confused me when preparing the motherboard was the Set System
Jumper section, it says: "Open: Auto, Close: 100Mhz (default). Auto: Support
FSB 266/333/400 Mhz CPU. The JP1 must be set to Auto when you are using FSB
266/333/400Mhz CPU." I think the CPU I am using is 333Mhz (but dont know how
to check) so I took out the Jumper pin.

Any ideas what is wrong? How can I manually change the RAM amount to 256MBs?
Is this probably the problem? Thanks a lot for any help, let me know if more
info is needed.

Cheers
Alex

Ask the folks at Gigabyte what the siren alarm means.

Al wrote:

> Hey all, a few months ago my pc started to crash randomly at various stages
> during the boot process and sometimes a few minutes after windows had loaded
> (up to 20 minutes in). I couldnt fix the problem, and was told that if it
> crashed during BIOS then it was definatly a hardware problem. I notcied that
> the graphics card was noisey, the motherboard fan occasionally stopped
> spinning completely and that one of the pins on power supply connection to
> the motherboard had turned black as if it had burnt.
>
> To fix the problem today I got a new motherboard, a new graphics card and a
> new power supply unit. The computer no longer fails during startup but every
> so often it crashes, the screen goes black and I get a siren style sound for
> a few seconds, then it shuts down.
>
> New Specs:
> Gigabyte 7VT600P-RZ (socket A) Motherboard
> XFX Ge Force 6200 128MB DDR TV-Out/DVI (AGP) (PVT44ARAMG) Graphics card
>
> It is the first time I have put a computer together by myself (but not the
> first time I have been inside the computer upgrading and reconnecting various
> hardware). I just noticed that in System Information it says "total physical
> memory 512.00 MB" even though I only actually have 256MBs.
>
> Other Specs:
> 256 DDR RAM
> AMD Athlon 2009Mhz
> Sound Blaster sound card
>
> One thing that confused me when preparing the motherboard was the Set System
> Jumper section, it says: "Open: Auto, Close: 100Mhz (default). Auto: Support
> FSB 266/333/400 Mhz CPU. The JP1 must be set to Auto when you are using FSB
> 266/333/400Mhz CPU." I think the CPU I am using is 333Mhz (but dont know how
> to check) so I took out the Jumper pin.
>
> Any ideas what is wrong? How can I manually change the RAM amount to 256MBs?
> Is this probably the problem? Thanks a lot for any help, let me know if more
> info is needed.
>
> Cheers
> Alex