I resently bought a new motherboard so I'd have room to fit a Physx card in. Ever since its been in, my PC seems to have become much more unstable. It's not BSODing but programs keep freezing and I have to wait about 30 seconds before normal service resumes. Aswell as the new motherboard and Physx card, I also put in some new RAM, could this be causing it? On paper, the motherboard and RAM should be technically better than my old stuff, but it doesnt seem that way so far. Anyway, here's some specs: AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400 CPU Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DQ6 motherboard Corsair Dominator CM2X1024-8500C5D RAM (4x1GB sticks) running at DDR2-800 The motherboard and RAM I had in before was: ASRock ALiveNF6G-DVI and 4x1GB of super ****** Kingston RAM (cheapest I could find, can't remember what model it was) Nothing has been overclocked and all drivers are up to date. I am running Vista which is apparently chock full of problems, but I've never experienced this before. Any ideas? Thanks in advance EDIT: I've done a memory test and a full stabilty test and everything seems fine. Can't think why it would be happening.
For all that the manufacturers claim, no mobo is true plug and play! So did you install Vista afresh when you switched the mobo? With XP a lot of people recommennd doing a repair install after switching the mobo and then installing the mobo drivers as if it were a fresh install. If you have Vista cd give repair installing a shot. As you might be aware there are a lot of tools that are available to test your hardware. But I believe it is a driver or configuration issue and nothing to with hardware! Regards, sunshine
Thanks for the reply, I didn't do a clean install. I have been thinking I probably should, but I just can't bring myself to do it I guess I should though..oh well
Do you mean you did a repair install? You can test your RAM and your new mobo with a Ubuntu (or other Linux distro) boot disk. First run the memtest for 30 minutes or so, then restart and boot into "try it mode" - if the motherboard seems stable, then the hardware is probably fine, and you can be more confident it is a driver issue. If you do a repair install of Windows, you replace the old HAL (hardware abstraction layer) with a new one, i.e a new set of drivers. You then should install the motherboard drivers. It shoouldn't be necessary to do a clean install but often you will run into problems with WGA (windows genuine advantage) if you try a repair install as the repair install procedure sometimes messes it up.
Really, all it takes are one or two basic components to be different enough (for instance the PCI bus controller) and Windows will promptly detect all that new hardware and reinstall the appropriate drivers. Not to say a clean or upgrade install wouldn't be better though, but it should definitely not be required except in a few specific cases such as changing the boot controller from ATA to AHCI or RAID for example, and even those can be worked around. I will say though, it's always good to have a spare hard drive lying around, that way you could experiment and see if a clean install fixes the issue, before ever touching your production drive.
It would be nice if dism had a command like "dism.exe /image:imagepath /redetecthardware" that forces windows do redetect and install all drivers.