smirnoff

Well... it is on the way out, what if i have to *replace* it because it is broken?

Hello everyone, merry Chrimbo and all that jazz. So, christmas was nice to me this year and I have found myself with around £300 to purchase new goods. A new motherboard and processor of course! I've needed a new pair for ages and now is the time, *hoping that january sales happen for pc parts* So, what I am asking of all you tech savvy people here on these forums, is, can you recomend me what is the best buy? I edit video footage alot, and play games such as MW2, Operation Flashpoint, etc, so I REALLY want to get something powerful, that will last me a while. I was thinking about an i5/i7 bundle as I have heard Intel are slightly better currently then AMD (at least on the personal computer level). If you people know of any cheap online sites or stores that have a good motherboard and processor bundle (or links to two seperate components that will work together) please let me know! Things to bear in mind: WINDOWS 7, 64BIT - max budget: £300 :D I'd like some memory too if possible, DDR3 me thinks! DXIDAG ATTACHED. many thanks DxDiag.txt

Just to let you all know, I tried the graphics card on other pcs and it failed. Turned out it was a duff card. How annoying! Thank you all for your help, you're stars!

Did all of this still nothing. Put it in the spare slot, worked for a few mins, then same thing. I'm testing it on another computer, but it seems a duff card. Any thoughts? >.<

Ok, now I am SERIOUSLY mad. I KEEP TRYING to get windows to stop installing stuff automaticaly when it starts but I can't. I've turned off automatic updates, switched off my wireless and changed the settings for windows automatic device installation - BUT NO GOOD. Every single time without fail as soon as I log in the ******* starts installing what it thinks is best for the computer, so I STILL can't install the latest driver. I just want to turn the PC on and double click the install icon for the latest driver on my desktop but windows beats me to it with its other choice of driver which i don't know where it finds it, but anyway. It pops up saying "WINDOWS DEVICE INSTALLER WMA MONITOR" and stars installing. Each time. And I can't unistall the driver and then install again straight away without restarting. It's a never ending circle of pain :( If anyone can help... please tell me how I can do this x.x P.S: I'm not sure if I can just run the latest driver over the old one without uninstalling the old one, but when I tried that dxdiag still shows it up as the old driver "1.85" or something instead of the 1.95" one i have.

FAIL. So, I downloaded the latest drivers but have noticed something. I have to unistall the old drivers first, right? When I do that and restart, on the restart windows automaticaly installs the so called "latest driver" but in dxdiag, it is a lower number then the one I downloaded off the nvidia site, so perhaps I have not had the latest one at all. I think I have switched this annoying automatic update thing off now, and will report back on if I can install the drivers myself without windows doing it for me.

Right so I unistalled the drivers, installed an old one first and will test it now. It said windows 7 64 bit compatible. And I dxdiaged again and it still says: Current Mode: 1680 x 1050 (32 bit) (59Hz) But I think I just realised, that 32 bit refers to colour, right? 16bit and 32 bit? So I don't think that is a problem. Going to test the card now...

Hello all, thanks for the replies. I am going to try and take the card out, put it in again and get rid of all the drivers then install them again. I'll let you know what happens and see if I can get a 64bit one off the net

Hello everyone, second time on here for me. Thank you for looking at this thread, and even more thank you's for any replies. So... I recently was given a spanking brand new Nvidia 9800 GT graphics card for Christmas. Early yes I know, but anyway, I shan't complain. I put it in, downloaded the latest drivers for it, and everything seemed fine. THEN I continued playing MW2 from my last point on my crappy old card (Nvidia 7600) and everything seemed wonderful. That was until I got to this snowmobile mission, where, as soon as I would get on the 'mobile and try to drive, my computer would crash. The screen would freeze, the sound would loop until I had to restart the computer myself. Thinking this was just a one-off, I tried again. Same problem, at the same time in the game. Weird right? So I thought, let's test another game out... the Sims 3 - that's pretty hardware intensive too. I double click the play icon, the screen goes to black (like it always does before the loading screen pops up) next thing I know the monitor switches off (loses any signal I mean) and I have to restart the computer again because it seemed to have crashed. That's when I lost it and here is a long list of everything I tried... 1. Roll back the drivers to an earlier version. (Tried but the setup said it couldn't find my graphics card, so then I used the one from the CD that came with the card which was pretty old, still same problem) 2. See if it was a power issue (no, I have 700watt power supply this should be ample!) 3. Run some heat tests to see if it was a heat problem (doesn’t seem like it, as the sims was just *starting* and it crashed when the heat was idle at about 40-50, also the CPU heat went up to 70celcius and the card was about 75 I think during the snowmobile bit on MW2, not too high) 4. Run a memory test (all fine) 5. Run benchmarking to test the card and heat again (no issues benchmark score of 414 or something and heat went up to like almost 80 no problem) 6. Run the game in safe mode (MW2) with all the graphics settings on off. MANAGED to pass the snowmobile bit, but then when I put the settings back to normal, on the next mission, same problem, CRASH. 7. Go onto these forums to try and see what is up, because I couldn’t find this problem elsewhere on the net. I don’t think it could be anything but something with the graphics, as my old card worked fine. I bet it’s something simple (or I am hoping) but I’m really getting angry now at this point XD Any help would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks! P.S: DXDIAG attached DxDiag.txt

Thanks again I tried this but the lowest number I can select is 3 - it won't let me do 0 seconds. Damn it! XD

Thank you so much for your help! I installed windows 7 (which works like a dream now) however when I start up, there is a selection process yet again for either windows 7 or my old XP (which doesn't exist anymore...again lol) If I want to speed up the wait (I think it's about 30 seconds to choose the OS) or remove XP from the list again, do I have to follow these instructions you gave me again? Remember I am using windows 7 now, so it might be different. Thanks so much for your help

Hello all, Firstly, thank you for browsing this thread, and if you do reply/help in any way, your help is greatly appreciated :D So, I have a hard drive split into 6 partitions. 1 (c:\) has my XP which I am going to upgrade to 7 very shortly. 2 (e:\ and d:\) used to have vista and an older xp on them which I removed ages ago but some files were left and couldn't be deleted, and the other 3 i use to backup/storage. So I chucked in a windows xp disk and formatted them both (e:\ and d:\ to remove the files I couldn't delete) thinking that I could get rid of those files - which I did. Of course, being a noob I completely forgot that now these drives had windows XP ready to install on them and now evertime I boot up my PC i have three choices to choose - all drives have XP on it. So, i deleted the partitions, and set them up again, this time NOT installing XP on them - so that they were raw. Formatted them once again so they are fresh, no problem and I can use them how I want to store files with no OS on them - fantastic. HOWEVER. I still have this problem now when I boot up my PC that 3 OS all XP pop up (the top two choices being the deleted and now non existent XP's and the last the current XP that I am about to upgrade). I have about 1 second to choose which one to boot up, which is very annoying, and if I miss it or walk out the room while the PC boots, it will select the top one automatically, try and boot, and then say that the XP files are missing/corrupted (DUH I deleted them...) and then restart the PC. So I guess, what I am asking for, is how the hell do I now stop the BIOS thinking that those two drives still have XP on them - when they don't. Or at least move the current OS I use (the bottom of the selection of three) to the top so that I don't have to frantically bash the down arrow when the menu appears. I hope this all makes sense, if not, i will try and explain again. Once again, thank you so much. Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 3 BIOS: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG - M2n-SLI Deluxe Processor: AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+, MMX, 3DNow (2 CPUs), ~2.7GHz Memory: 3582MB RAM Page File: 641MB used, 4822MB available DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)

how did this happen? can i find out? how can i prevent this next time?

wow that sucks. so all my documents will be gone?

i tired pressing f10 but it took me to some RAID screen when should i press f10?