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I picked up a pc from a garage sale and I am trying to get it running. It is a gigabyte 8tx c motherboard with a p4 1.9 ghz processor. No hard drive and bad case. I installed everything including powersupply into a case I had. At first xp home kept crashing on installing devices, So I removed everything but agp vid card this time it installed but then crashed immediately on boot up. So i pulled agp and installed pci vid card. Now it goes into windows but freezes whenever you try to download or run a program. I installed a nic and can surf web fine no crashes. If I boot into safe mode I can run all different ttests with no problems. I downloaded the chipset drivers from gigabyte and installed them and also reflashed bios with most current version. I just am running out of options here. Please help any feedback would be greatly appreciated as I feel I may have overlooked something. Thanks Jeff

Try changing out the RAM... GL eGo

It is rambus. I ran memtest and it seemed fine. Should it be able to run with one or two mem sticks in it. I tried to pull them out and check but I couldn't get it to boot without all four. there is four sticks of 128 two kingston one samsung and one generic. Thanks for your help. If I install an agp vid card it crashes when the blue windows screen come on but it will go fine into safe mode. Thanks Jeff

Originally posted by chevyjeff
It is rambus. I ran memtest and it seemed fine. Should it be able to run with one or two mem sticks in it.

If you remove any of the ram sticks, then you need to replace the stick with a continuity RIMMs (or CRIMMs).

Some suggestions, but you just might have a flaky mobo:

- Remove all RAMs and re-install. Sometimes you get a bit of corrosion on the edge connectors. Blow out the sockets with some canned air before re-inserting them.

- Set all BIOS settings to Safe Defaults (most BIOS menus have a menu selection to reset everything to safe default).

- In BIOS make sure AGP Aperature is set for the default of 64Mb. Disable Video Shadow RAM and Video RAM Caching.

- Remove the heatsink, clean off the old heat sink compound or pad and replace with new compound. Make certain that the heatsink is securely and levely placed on the CPU.

- Try under-clocking if the mobo allows you to. Might just be a flaky mobo or CPU but it may stay stable at a slightly slower speed.

Hope this helps...

when I've had intermittent and inconsistent errors its normally......

power supply

memory

ram(check heatsink & goop)

poor vid card seating

mb is the catchall and most difficult to identify

thanks for all the help. I think it is the motherboard. I ran a 6 hour test on cpu and it passed. The memory passed memtest. I ran another test and all passed except the video and sound. Sound is on board and video passes on different pc. Still worth the $2 I paid for it. Thanks for trying Jeff

disable the sound, and use a pi video card.....