Hi Guys

I know we have a lot of IT specialists on here and I wonder if you can help me.

I have built a number of computers over the years, I’m ok bolting things together but I’m crap at the software, so sometimes I have problems that leave me stumped.

The one I have at the present has been niggling me for months, and started when I installed windows XP service pack 2.

The computer started to freeze temporarily (for a couple of seconds at a time) and then it continues as before. The mouse cursor will freeze on the screen (whether this is the mouse or the computer I don’t know), if you are playing music it will jitter for a couple of seconds then continue.

I enjoy playing IL2 Forgotten battles (ww2 Combat fight simulator) and this will lock up at the most inopportune moments (just when you have a kill shot) and when you restart, the game has moved on and my sights are clear.

The sound problem is solved by not having the sound on, the mouse and the visual freezing is the worst.

I have wondered if it is to do with buffers.

Do I have to take the whole thing apart a piece at a time and reinstall or does anyone know what the problem is?

There has always been a slight problem with all the flight sims when there has been lots of anti aircraft artillery going off and lots of planes in view, especially on a snow back ground.

The spec is as follows

2800 AMD barton chip
1Gb ram
350 Gb of hard drive space on 2 drives
128 Mb geforce titanium graphics card
5.1 creative labs sound card

Any help would be appreciated.

Ditch

Hi Ditch, I'm no expert but a couple of things spring to mind:

First is your power supply powerful enough? I'm afraid I couldn't tell you how powerful it should be, although seeing as you've built PCs before I'm sure you know.

The other thing I wondered was whether something could be overheating, causing temporary loss or reduction of power? My guess would be that this would happen more frequently when the computer is doing processor-intensive tasks such as playing a game.

Quite often you can keep a track of various component temperatures through the BIOS screen, so it might be worth running your computer for a while and checking to see if any temperatures go too high.

Also check that your fans and vents are all clear of fluff so that the air can circulate properly.

Other than that maybe it could be some sort of driver error? I don't really know much about that though I'm afraid!

Pete

i think it might be your graphics card, sounds like an old one
installing the microsoft updates might have just "pushed it over the edge"

just had a quick look - is the graphics card a geforce 2 or 3 or what ?
whichever it is i think that may be the best place to start as the rest of the system isn't too bad

[Edited on 28/3/07 by Scotty]

I had a similar thing with SP2 when I installed it ages ago, turned out to be drivers needed updating, IIRC it was the drivers for the graphics card. I would suggest do a websearch for updated drivers for all your extra cards/software etc. Hope this helps.

Probably drivers as already stated, but be aware that the latest nvidia drivers can be a bit buggy as well.
Also check your AV is not interfering.
You could also try running a minimal boot config, i.e. dont let anything other than required services load and see if it still does it, then bring them up one at a time until it starts doing it again.
You could also run the performance monitor or setup a trace to see if there is a process causing it.

That should keep you busy for a while

Cheers

Alex

An AMD 2800 (launched 2002) doesn't run as fast as it's numbers suggest either (2.25GHz), it's respective motherboard and chip are known to have a few bugs and glitches - it may be this, 350Gb on two drives might be slow access times - this together with the small G-Card (which is very likely the problem) may be it.

First things first update the drivers, buy/install new Card... proceed with caution and good luck!

Steve