The COMPUTER action group-help save Elsa's PC!

[The GodMother]

Iam coming for dinner saturday as its chicken pie.

[Undercover-Elsa]

Chips or mash?

[charleyfarley]

Chips or mash?

 

 

chips............it's a techie-PC thread:D

[maroondevo52]

Thread moved.

[Undercover-Elsa]

Oooh..thought I'd gone dizzy

Great idea. Love the new threads!

[Undercover-Elsa]

chips............it's a techie-PC thread:grin:

 

[Conniff]

If you don't mind having a play with the bits inside elsa, then unplug everything and remove the memory and then boot it up. It will stop when it gets to the memory check, but gets to the memory check after it has done the southbridge, so if you get a long beep when it reaches mem test, the likelyhood of the board being duff is not very great.

Just put one mem stick back in and reconnect the hard drive and then go into the bios and select 'defaults' and then F10 and see how that goes.

[The GodMother]

MAsh please chips are to greasy for me.

[Undercover-Elsa]

Chips AND mash it is then. Cauliflower or carrots? Flakey or puff?

 

Well the motherboard's arrived from Scan, sans driver disk, manual and fittings, apart from cables. Luckily its the same model I've got so I've still got my original Asus disk...but they don't know that do they?

Fired off an email to support 2 days ago and still no response. Tut!

 

Conniff - good points there, had I not already ordered the motherboard I'd have tried that out.

If the problem persists with the new board I'll try it but after that I honestly don't know what to try next. Will worry about that if necessary!

 

Elsax

[The GodMother]

no cauliflower and flakey pastry please. LOL

[Undercover-Elsa]

It's now morphed to fillet steak with mushrooms, turmeric mash, purple sprouting broccoli and a white wine jus. What the hell! (it was on special offer )

That said, he's not arrived yet...

[Undercover-Elsa]

OK new motherboard in, fillet steak eaten, let's see what happens in the morning....

Elsa x

[Desperate Daniella]

If you are still having problems and aren't too far from SW London I can put you in touch with this amazing lady who will sort out your computer problems and won't charge you a fortune. She charges for the job - not by the hour. She has saved my life and my computer(s).

[Undercover-Elsa]

Hi

Thanks DD - sadly too far away for me.

On an optimistic note, new board in last night, started from cold this morning..voila! No system 32 error! I did get an initial failed to start normally, choose Safe Mode etc screen, but that's probably just the new hardware. Chose normal startup and off it went. Put back my 2 new sticks of RAM too. Fingers crossed. It's very fast at moment, really zippy.

For perfection I'm going to have to do another clean install of XP I think (those old error messages are sooo untidy) then update drivers and hopefully that should be it. Hopefully..

Thanks for all the great suggestions, really helped!

Elsa x

[dx100uk]

hey well done

 

dx

[Undercover-Elsa]

Spoke too soon. Always a bad idea

Installed MsWord and rebooted, got same system32 error message.

Booted from XP disk, did Fixboot, restarted,did auto chkdsk found/fixed loads of errors, then started OK.

Away from the motherboard and back to the drawing board.

Another odd thing, (ignoring daylight saving) noticed the clock was wrong after this, 45 minutes out, so possibly the CMOS battery in the new motherboard is old stock.

More headscratching and research...

[Undercover-Elsa]

Beginning to go round in circles and wonder if the NEW PSU is faulty...

[dx100uk]

are you 'just' installing word [and where from what version?]

it puzzles me why that caused it or was it just because the fault appeared at that time?

cant see it being the bios nor PSU.

 

keep trying

 

dx

[Undercover-Elsa]

Hi, thanks dx..

I think the instal was coincidental, it was just the restart that was the problem

I've been running on minimum software during the troubles but had to instal Word (Pro 2003) to do some work today.

[dx100uk]

ok i need to get a few things clear here.

 

when you say you installed winxp from clean,

blank [removed all partitions] HDD, original winxp disc

AND you have ALL network connections unplugged

i'e NO WAY it could get an internet connection

 

got it installed

put on AVGfree 8.5

 

connected to the internet

updated AVG

updated windows TOTALLY!

going back several times till there are

no updates outstanding

 

then installed office pro 2003 ?

 

dx

[Desperate Daniella]

:eek::eek:

 

You are so clever about this stuff. It terrifies the life out of me.

 

xx

[dx100uk]

no.

nothing that cannot be learned by a search engine and typing questions in.

 

listen, a new install of any MS OS, if it has an internet connection, WILL typically be infected in

 

anyhow.

 

lets wait.

 

dx

[Undercover-Elsa]

Morning.

Ive been up stewing on this since 5am. My body clock still hasn't adjusted to daylight saving!

Thanks Dx -

The last clean install was last week. Done WITH network connection via router. Although it was a paid version, I no longer use AVG as it was so problematic. Downloaded all updates immediately then installed Microsoft Security Essentials. (It won't install before the updates are done, says it needs SP3 minimum)

Then I installed MS Word 2003 from disk yesterday.

I also updated the graphics driver last night.

This morning: Cold boot, loaded windows OK but MS Security Essentials (AV) faulting. Presumably the elements that load early at boot up weren't loaded correctly as it was OK after an immediate restart.(System32 again)

Error log:

Microsoft Antimalware engine has been terminated due to an unexpected error. Failure Type: Crash Exception code: 0xc0000005 Resource: file:\Device\HarddiskVolume1\W INDOWS\system32\wbem\Logs\wbem core.log

 

Thinking back all my probs with AVG and Commodo before that seem to be related to problems with loading system32 on cold boot which still brings me round to RAM. Boards OK RAMS ok so going to try disconnecting other stuff - DVD / TV card / floppy drive to see if somethings pulling too much power at expense of RAM.

Any other suggestions welcome!

[Desperate Daniella]

Thank you, dx, but I wouldn't know the questions to ask in the first place.

 

Elsa, this must be a nightmare. If you get really stuck is there no-one who could get this down to London for you? If they brought it to me I could deliver it for you. The lady who looks after my computer is so reasonable (she'd need to be with me!) and once got everything back from a totally shattered hard drive! When she was away in April I didn't have a computer for three weeks because everyone else I spoke to charged £60-£80 an hour so I had to wait until she came back.

 

Sorry can't give any technical help.

 

DD

[Undercover-Elsa]

Awww that's lovely of you to offer DD.

I'm a couple of hundred miles away, unfortunately

Trouble with me is that once I get my teeth into something I don't like to admit defeat!

At least it's working during the day so I can get my work done, although after just repairing the boot sector again for some reason Ive now lost XP style in display, gone back to classic with no xp option.

Going to wipe it and repartition/install XP again tomorrow. Clean, as DX says, no internet connection. Going to run it for day bare with no updates and see what happens following morning.

Got someone waiting for website updates today so need to get that out of the way first.

Any updates at your end? Are you feeling any better?

Elsa x