Weird Aptiva ?hardware? problem

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selkie

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Hi everyone...

I'm having a problem that had initially looked easy to solve, but now appears more puzzling.

Setup: Aptiva P3/550, 256mb, 20gb, Savage4 video card, DVD and HP cd burner. Trying to run Visual Studio .NET 2003 under Win2k.

Here's what happened: During the Visual Studio installs, the system would always hang if I tried to scroll through something (like the Microsoft license text). Occasionally, on reboot, the BIOS would report that the amount of RAM had changed to 192mb.

Since this sounded like a bad RAM chip, I took out one of the two 128mb's and tried again. No dice. Tried the other chip. That didn't work either. Tried the other slot with each of the two chips. Neither fixed the problem. I did end up getting a successful install by avoiding scrolling (and trying a few times -- it hung randomly a few times during install). Self-diagnostic software didn't find anything even with both RAM chips in place, although it hung after maybe 5 runs through the memory.

So VS.NET is finally onboard and running. I'm scrolling in one of the programs, and ... doh! It hangs. I'm starting to think that it might be a software problem, so I fire up Symantec AntiVirus. That hangs too. In fact, it hangs every time I try it. By 'hangs', I mean completely locked up. The screen gets this little 1x2 inch area of static on it (over the normal screen image, not instead of it) and you can't even ctrl-alt-del out.

Oddly, through all of this I've never gotten a BSOD, just these crashes. I'd assumed it was the hardware because of that BIOS message, but trying to isolate a bad component was unsuccessful. This is a brand-new install of Win2k and VS.NET, as of literally a few days ago (not an upgrade, but a fresh install). What's going on? It doesn't crash at the same exact place each time btw...

thanks for any help you can give!
Charles
 
1- Un install vs. net
2- Boot up with boost diskett( www.bootdisk.com)
3- Install Vs.net
4- See if it hangs
5- If still hanging, try a re formatt and install this program first. If the same problem occurs you know its not software conflicting, but might be your instalation disk is corrupt or a peice of hardware is bad.
6- By this time i would suggest swapping video cards and ram from an other machine just to check if its those. If its not it wouldn't be any other hardware
7- You know your instalation will always be corrupt, go unix or linux lol, you'll need a new disk sorry no matter what os
 
... but shouldn't the other programs (Symantec and the system's self-check) be stable if the problem is in VS.NET? The crashes occur even when VS.NET hasn't been run since reboot, nor anything I've written using it.

This is a fresh install (and fresh re-install!) of Win2k, although I suppose I can create a boot disk and re-re-install Win2k if that would help.

Totally agree about un*x (and Mac OSX for that matter) being superior, but unfortunately I'm stuck writing this stuff in a Windoze environment.

thanks for the help!
Charles
 
selkie said:
... but shouldn't the other programs (Symantec and the system's self-check) be stable if the problem is in VS.NET? The crashes occur even when VS.NET hasn't been run since reboot, nor anything I've written using it.

The problem may not be in vs.net but other programs, they might have affected vs.net and now every program on the computer is connected in a circit of lagynes when scrolling. If this holds true when you install a new program it would lag as well, so my advise is to install a program you have not neccecarly need and see if it works. If it is laggy than you know its formed from a circit and some software program is causing every program to crash.

This is a fresh install (and fresh re-install!) of Win2k, although I suppose I can create a boot disk and re-re-install Win2k if that would help.



Sometimes the installation leaves out bits and peices or goes wrong somewhere, i would do an other fresh install.

Totally agree about un*x (and Mac OSX for that matter) being superior, but unfortunately I'm stuck writing this stuff in a Windoze environment.

thanks for the help!
Charles

Hope you fix it soon
 
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