Hi, Windows 7 kept freezing, this could occur at anytime from a few seconds to several hours. I just about tried everything to find the cause to no avail, then in the words of the great Sherlock Holmes. I eliminated the probable cause and what ever was left no matter how impossible is the culprit. This turned out to be the onboard SATA controllers.... On my PC-DL Deluxe there are two SATA controllers an Intel ICH5 and a Promise 378 TX2 Fastrak. The intel one would not let me boot if the 100Meg partition was present, the promise would but froze if I installed my Wi-Fi card. Something to do with IRQ's. I tried two Wi-Fi cards an Atheros AR5001 x+ 108Mhz and a Realtek RTL8185L neither worked. After trying to find up-dated drivers and failing. I obtained a Silicon Image Sil3114 4 port SATA controller up-dated the controllers BIOS and downloaded the Windows 7 drivers. Disabled the onboard controllers even the IDE since I don't need them (I have 2 LG DVD DL Rewriters SATA and a 200Gig Seagate SATA HD) re-installed Win 7. Everything works as it should.......Except!!!! DO-NOT-RUN windows Scandisk this is a NO-NO if your SATA controllers need a driver to be loaded when starting. For some reason Scandisk will overwrite the drivers and stop the system booting. Any idea why? I think possibly trying to eliminate rootkits, loaders or viruses......
The funny thing is that my computer runs a good 10deg cooler now that I disabled the onboard controllers. It took me three weeks to solve this problem. Both Intel and Promise are not supporting these controllers in Windows 7, or for Vista. I did not have problems with XP, but that was mainly due to a hardwired network rather than Wi-Fi. The only problems were in Vista when the Intel controller would not let me record DL DVD's the odd B.S.O.D with the message of IRQ Divde by zero error Driver (did not say which one) which went away on a re-boot.
Sorry to bust chops here, but the Asus PC-DL Deluxe is a 6-year old motherboard. As such, it is not Windows Vista or 7 Ready so chances are it's not compatible natively with Windows 7 or even Vista for that matter. I would also guess Asus is not making Windows 7 compatible drivers for the motherboard as well. What I believe you should do is buy a newer motherboard and downgrade back to XP or Windows 2003 Server on the Asus PC-DL Deluxe hardware. Just a thought.......
well thanks for that, but I now have no problems with windows 7 running on my PC-DL Deluxe board. It's totally stable now with no freezing. My windows experience score of 4.6 might not be great, but it suits me and runs my favorite progs and games and I for one see no sense in forking out for a new board, processor, memory & graphics card etc just so I can run the latest OS at breakneck speed. However, if my experience helps others to resolve their issues with windows 7 so much the better. bye the way the Intel ICH5 and Promise 378 combo is not restricted to the PC-DL Deluxe other ASUS boards have them as well so...........
I have promise controllers on my MSI motherboard, I have to say I also some times get a freeze - however I dont have the controller drivers installed. I only use the onboard IDE controller from Ati. My motherboard basically was made during last year before Windows 7 - but supports Vista.