Computer dies to black screen

N

Nickp

Guest
Hi all, been reading the forums for a while, but this'll be my first post :)

Built myself my latest computer, had no end of trouble to start with, went through 3 mobos and 2 Athlon XPs before I got it working, all dead on arrival.

Recently its started crashing to a black screen from all sorts of different situations, wether I'm playing games, working in windows etc. Power stays on, it doesn't reset itself, but my monitor stops displaying anything (the problem's not the monitor, I've swapped it with another monitor and same problem).

It hasn't happened very often so I've been able to live with it.

Switched on my machine tonight, after a crash earlier in the day, and it wouldn't boot, which is a problem I can't live with! Drive lights flashed, keyboard lights flashed, it all looked as though it was booting ok, but I got nothing on the monitor, then after doing that it gave some random bleeps (crap mobo manual with no explanation of error beeps, so I don't know what it was telling me). Restarted it, no luck. Anyway, I pulled the power cable from the box, plugged it back in, hit the power - all systems are go! It all booted up fine.

Can anyone explain this phenomenon? Which bit of machine do I need to go out and spend lots of hard earned money on? :(

Specs are:
Spacewalker AK31 Mobo
Athlon XP 1700+
256 DDR RAM
64MB VooDoo 5500
710D Hansol Monitor
20GB Western Digital HD
15GB Maxtor HD

OS:
XP Professional

Only other thing I've noticed is on shutdown sometimes, Windows tells me I've run out of virtual memory and has given me some more, but it only ever tells me this on shutdown.

Any help at all would be appreciated,
Cheers
Nick
 
Ack mate, pc's are the biggest problem in human history, I havn't had a pc to this day that hasn't had a problem.

Ands its always wen its just perfect and....... kaboom something breaks.

All I can say is good luck wit the troubleshooting, I just hope some one out there has the answer

Adam:D
 
One of the problems is I can't recreate the problem. It seems fairly random, so if I go play with the BIOS, theres no way to check if its done anything, unless its deciding not to boot again, then I can't get to the BIOS to change anything!

One other thing to mention, its not just the display - when it crashes, it won't respond to keyboard commands either.

Nick
 
Yup, VIA chipset - I'll go do all that, see how it behaves in the future.

Thanks catch23
 
Disabled the USB IRQ, that didn't cause any problems.

Disabled ACPI, Windows wouldn't load, computer POSTed, then froze. I hit reset, windows told me it had failed to load, what would I like to do - tried to get it to load, froze again.

Does XP need ACPI enabled to run then? I'm guessing not as catch23 says he has disabled it on his box, so why should windows refuse to load if I disable it?

Now to get the latest VIA Drivers
 

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