Are PCs meant to be unpredictable?

Seems no matter what I do, something never goes right whenever it comes to gettin a new PC, or upgradin a current one...gah..

Gotta be my 3rd experiance with a PC not going right for me.

Finally got my PC back after the parts I ordered came in, and got them installed by m PC-Tech guy (I like giving him the pain of handling the S&H, along with warrenty), got me a new PC tower case, a new mobo that has both an AGP & PCIe slot on them (which also received good reviews, it's from ASRock), so I can upgrade from my GF6800 GT someday without having to spend cash on a new mobo. Also had to get a new CPU, so I grabbed an AMD64 3700+ (same ghz as my older AMD64 2100+, but it has a much larger L2 cache and other crap), and bumped the ram up an extra gb..

Anyway, got everything setup/reinstalled (apparently Microsoft doesn't like me changing critical hardware components), everything was working fine, then I load up Oblivion for a test-drive, and poof, nothing was being displayed, heard music, hit escape to skip intro movies which weren't showing, oh nice, the main menu is full of garbled graphics with only the text appearing correctly, had to use task manager to close the game.

Thought it was maybe a game-specific issue, booted up HL2:Episode1, nope, same issue, 'cept this time everything was all white, as it 99% of the textures were missing, for some reason Alyx's hair was showing though, along with PC screens..., and misc. objects, couldnt do much in it though since I could barely see where I was going with everything being bright white......other recent games, nothing gets drawn at all to the screen.....and this only occured in 3d games also, PC doesn't crash or anything, WinXP itself looks/runs perfectly fine, just games.

Tried changing drivers, nope, tried some older games, apparently DirectDraw games work (Worms Armageddon ftw, cant believe I'm still playing that game 10 years later), so I checked DXDiag, and it states everything's fine, the Direct3d tests worked fine with the stupid rotating box as well.....

And then nothing like a couple hours of my life gone by as I try to figure out what the problem was, couldn't Google anything relevant, checked BIOS settings, everything was A-Ok (including PC temperature, which I'm now a bit anal about since my last PC died because of what appeared to be a CPU-fan that was on its last legs).

And now I'm sitting here typing this, as I got no anecdote-style ending and what not, as the problem still persists here, but I aint giving up yet. ;P

Just really wish PCs were more reliable, but that'll never happen without some standards set, and the programmers behind the drivers actually test their drivers before releasing them to the public...and etc. So many hours of my life gone because of computers....now if only I weren't so into using them for the majority of my activities.... /sigh

Now to see if reslotting my gfx card will do the trick. ;/
[EDIT] Nope, damn, was hopin it would, cause it did the last two cases the card was actin weird. [/EDIT]


On another note, anyone here ever had experiance with faulty RAM? It appears to be more common then I thought they'd be, had 3 cases of that across 2 computers of mine in the last 4 years.

Got the latest chipset drivers? (nForce/Via etc.) Sounds like that might be the issue.

Faulty RAM will usually cause random and arbitrary crashes, normally only in applications (as there is little chance critical windows components (aka. the kernel) will be loaded into faulty memory).

BTW, tried Linux? I hear the new Ubuntu is really good...

'eh, I'm a heavy gamer, so Linux wouldn't do me any good...

Regardin RAM, can it cause your PC to reset for no reason at all? Already had this system just reset for no reason twice on my, one just 2min ago, and I lost my Firefox browser settings in the process.
(time to load my backup ;/)

Funny enough that it happens just right as I was actually about to complete the manufacturer's driver download.

[EDIT] God those random resets are getting on my nerves....anyhow, appeared the drivers on my mobo-provided CD are the same as the ones on their site....installed the ones off the site regardless, still no change.
(and the fact they spell "graphics card" as "graphy card" scares me a bit in their AGP driver)

[EDIT2] Looks like the mobo has shitty drivers, found a possible solution to my prob over on another forum, n the process of trying it.

I'm never had any trouble. You must just be cursed 'cause you're from Kanuckistan.

Could be. ;/


At any rate, least the driver-issue is sorted out, though the ASRock company (part of Asus I believe) lost a few brownie points because I had to find a solution to the problem myself, as their site has no trouble-shooting section at all.

Too bad the FPS in Oblivion didn't bump up at all though with the new CPU, probably still bottlenecked by my gfx card, oh well, just glad I can play it again.


It's just.....how the HELL can you screw up so badly on the drivers for something critical like a motherboard?

I'd check for heat issues...

resetting can be a PSU problem i.e. running too many components on a crap PSU. I had this before.

and yes PCs ae biatches, there's always dumb problems occuring.

If you're worried about ram, run memtest. And also make sure you reset the bios cos a computer can reboot when memory is run at incorrect timings.

yeah memtest is great. I've got it on a bootable CD. I've detected duff RAM with it before.

I'd check the psu as well, a faulty one can cook the video card as i learned from experience.

Sounds like a partially buggered GFX card to me. I've had one before that worked fine in 2D (Windows etc.) but the 3D rendering hardware developed a fault after about a week and I started getting weird graphics glitches.

P.S. When building a new system, I always figure in a 'bedding in' time after the machine is built. There always seems to be some problems that have to be addressed after the build. This usually involves having to return one or two faulty components. I'm no longer surprised when a piece of kit arrives DOA. Mind you, I haven't built a PC for several years and have no plans to build one in the future, frankly. My nerves can no longer take the stress. :)

The point of running Linux was to figure out whether it's a driver issue or not. If Linux runs flawlessly, at least you'll know the hardware works.

Not for no reason at all, no. Sounds like you're experiencing those BSOD errors that I'm continually told don't happen on XP.

Anyway, to get the BSOD to show, go to My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced -> Startup and Recovery -> Settings and disable "Restart Automatically. Then crash a few time, and jot down the errors you get. Google is your friend.

Because that's what they do. Didn't I tell you to get an EPoX or ABit? :o>

Must have been someone else FD. =/

Regardin the BSOD thing, didn't think of that, did the thing, tossed me up an error saying Alerter blahblahblah service wasnt on for it to give you the error message, I goto my admin controls, dang thing aint listed under my services to enable, /sigh, stupid Windows.

Go to BIOS and drop your AGP speed down to 1X (if it will let you) and see if the problem goes away.

This isn't a fix, but if there is a change in behaviour after you drop the speed, the problem is definately related to motherboard chipset and/or drivers thereof.

**EDIT** If you can't change AGP speed in the BIOS, there's a Windows app that can do it but the name of it escapes me for the moment!

How does an issue like this mean PCs are unpredictable?

It sounds like a bunch of off-the-shelf hardware was slapped together by the "PC-tech guy", and then no testing was done at all and it got handed back to you.

It is MUCH easier now than it was a few years ago to put PCs together from discrete components, but it has never and probably will never be as simple as buying any random parts/pieces, then assembling it all and shazaam it all works perfectly.

NoBoDo: Agreed. It is extremely easy to bodge a few things into a working PC, but it does pay to research tricksy things like motherboard and chipset. A wrong choice there can mean a whole lot of frustration. You really don't want to place an order for all your kit only to find that your graphics card has a particular incompatability with a certain motherboard.

A quick Google for "asus ati problems" should be a good starting point. Not that I imply anything about Asus and ATI, I just used it for an example!

Well in defense of my supplier (gettin tired of usin "techy" as a way to describe whatever it is you call that line of business), he was a bit swamped during the time he was workin on it, and I opted to take it home a couple days early so I can actually do my gaming, as a week without my PC already was torture enough as is.

He know's his parts pretty well, as when I got the original system built over a couple years ago, it, ran, freaking, flawlessly, aside from a faulty stick of ram that only went kaputz on ram-heavy games (UT2004 w/ the load-all-models option on for example), but was easily remedied.

Really should have done my own research though, prob is, hard to find good site's that actually discuss brands, spec sheets, compabitilities/quirks, speeds, etc, without having to Google all day, anyone got any sites they recommend?

There's no one site that will cover everything. You can't just take one forum's worth of opinion and use it as a base to make a decision on.

You need to access a UK forum and a US forum at the very least.

Sitting on Google all day is a tiny price to pay when the reward is a confidently made purchasing decision.

Still, as I've just learned (from an entirely unrelated thing): if you fax or email your intended supplier and state your terms and conditions of purchase before you order your PC parts, you can get a full refund if you encounter incompatabilities.

Something as simple as

"dear supplier, I wish to order an abit an8 motherboard, amd 64 3700+ cpu and 2x crucial 512MB ddr400 for the purpose of building a working PC which needs to run 24/7/365 without incident, please confirm that the price of these items comes to £x and that they will be suitable for my requirements?"

If you get a 'yes', place your order. If you find they don't work together (and the parts aren't actually faulty) then they have breached the contract of sale and you are entitled to return the good for a full refund.

Already can do that with the guy I normally hook-up with, 'tis a beauty when something doesn't work after tinkering with it, that you can say "screw it", send it back, grab something else I may have read up about that'll work with my other components, etc.