Image by romkey via Flickr
So this weekend I sent a lot of time trying to install and fix a computer I built a couple of years ago. Apparently the power supply box I bought for this computer when I originally started building this computer was a cheap mess that nearly messed up the entire computer and still may have. The 400GB hard drive that was originally inside of the computer that I’m using at this moment to type this out (the computer I built) was ruined because it was never getting enough power from the PSU (power supply unit). The hard drive of course froze up every time it didn’t receive enough power to spin up to function the way that it should. Well I recently took out the cheap 600W PSU that ruined my hard drive and put back in the more expensive Thermaltake PSU that’s only 430W PSU that came with the Thermaltake case that houses everything. I should have kept this PSU in from the beginning but when I was originally building this PC, I wanted to have a SLi set up with the dual video cards since my motherboard was capable of running this set up. Well, never mind that now because I may have even messed up the motherboard because of that old PSU. I recently bought a new 500GB hard drive from eBay and started installing it on Friday night. Went to put the Windows 7 operating system on it I downloaded from Microsoft but it kept restarting during the “Set up is checking video performance.” a place where the installation wasn’t supposed to restart the computer at all. GREAT. After hours of reinstalling windows, I gave up and put the old 30GB once 80GB IDE hard drive back into the case which is what I’m using right now.
I Googled or attempted to Google why my installation kept crashing before it could finish and became convinced that the reason behind the failures was that I was using the same SATA cable that I used for the 400GB hard drive that was ruined by that cheap PSU. So I proceeded to go to eBay and order 2 SATA cables which will be here sometime this coming week. In the meantime, I found an unused SATA cable on my dresser buried under papers a few hours ago. But before I go into that, lets talk about the craziness I’m still experiencing even though the computer now is exactly how it was before I started messing with it on Friday. Now the computer randomly restarts or freezes up and never unfreezes. The picture on the monitor randomly jumbles up to where the entire screen is unreadable. None of this stuff was occurring before. Especially the jumbled up picture thing. I opened the computer back up and moved the nVidia video card to the second PCI slot and used a different plug to plug into the IDE hard drive and took some things out just to see if there might be too many things on the PSU. Same thing kept happening except for the screen jumbling happens less. SO FREAKING ANNOYING!!!
Anyway, I found this SATA cable tonight so I opened up the computer once again and put my new hard drive back in again using the unused, still in the wrapper, SATA cable that I had just found and guess what??? The windows installation still crashes like it did before with the old SATA cable!! SO FREAKING ANNOYING!!! So I guess the cables aren’t my problem. It’s definitely something else. I’ve come to the conclusion that it has to be my motherboard. Too many things are starting to act up at the same time for it not to, right? I have no clue right now. I’ve run memory tests and I’ve run chkdsk on the drive that I’m using at this moment and no errors were found. I’m currently running chkdsk in the back ground now that’s checking the new hard drive I just bought. As I’m tying this I’m just waiting for the screen to go jumbled or for it to freeze up or for it to randomly restart. I hope that it doesn’t. I began thinking that it was a memory problem when it seems as though every time I got to where I was using a lot of memory the computer seemed to randomly restart. Memory test didn’t find any errors though. Oh and not to mention the blue screen of death I got earlier today that mentioned memory maintenance, I think it was. Right now I’m in the process of just doing one thing at a time before I jump the gun and buy something else. For all I know because of a problem that already existed with this set up, the 400GB disk I have may be still some good. At this point I have no clue. I’ll keep you updated on what I find out… just had to share my anguish. Thanks for reading!!
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