UPDATE
Well what was going to be a routine upgrade and swap around og gfx cards turned out to be a complete nightmare.
I did the prep work for my system by downloading latest ati drivers, driver cleaner pro and printed off the readme file as advised in the forum faq.
I removed the drivers in control panel and rebooted into safe mode to use the driver cleaner program and....no go.
Windows kept getting as far as loading a driver called btknrl and then it re-booted itself. after a couple of boots windows stopped loading altogether. It just got as far as updating dmi pool data the either hung or re-booted. Mmmmmm i thought. I checked that everything was ok in the bios and during post and it all seemed fine. I then got the xp disc and booted onto that to do a repair. I put in the disk for 3rd party sata/raid drivers and then went to the repair option and was told that windows setup could not see a hdd attachted. puzzling yet again. The sata drive seemed visible in the post sequence yet windows setup says it's not there. I then grabbed a spare hdd which had xp on it and slaved that in a booted from that and up came windows. But in windows the sata hdd was not visible. Then i re-installed the motherboard drivers and raid drivers and when i re-booted the sata drive partions came visible in xp on the slaved drive. very strange. I then spent some time comparing the windows installation and deduced the parts of the raid/sata drivers were missing of my sata drive. I cherry picked some components and also found the folder for the last known configuration was missing from my normal xp install so i copied it across even though the setup was different. I disconnected the slaved in hdd and booted up on my sata hdd and i'm into xp. but things wer'nt quite right, no usb stuff was working, not even visible in harware manager. i did a system restore to a time before removing the drivers but still no usb. I re-installed the mobo drivers on the sata drive and still no usb. I then did a bios update to the latest version and the usb stuff came back, result. now i'm back to square one and it's half 10 at night and i'm knackered after being up since 4 in the morning.
saturday morning.
With a fresh day ahead i started by very carefully uninstalling the video drivers again and booting up into safe mode with fingers crossed. it worked
, and i used driver cleaner, shutdown installed the x1600 card and rebooted and installed new ati drivers etc. everything seemed great and i installed my new game GTA: san andreas and played that for an hour or so on max settings and looked sweet and smooth. sorted.
onto phase 2. My lads computer. I did the driver cleaner process on his computer and installed the 9800 pro (has an artic cooler fitted) cleaned all the dust out a put some fresh AS 5 on the processor core, reset the bios to optimal settings and booted up and installed new drivers. Everything seemed fine but after half an hour of playing a game his computer just turned itself off. Mmm i thought sounds like a heat issue. I checked the cpu temp and it seemed fine at 40 degrees. The cpu has a thermaltake volcano 7 on it too. I checked the 9800 pro and it seemed very hot. I doubled checked the voltage in the bios and it was at 1.5v, ok. his computer did this a few more times at around 30 mins of playing games each time. So i took the computer and ran it without anything connected and with all the panels off. It ran ok for an hour and when i switched it off the 9800 pro was still very hot. put it all back together and thought i'd swap the cards over. So with the x1600 in his computer it seemed to work fine. I put the 9800 pro back in my computer and in order to get a card comparison i decided to play gta:san andreas but it would not run. I uninstalled the game and re-installed and nope it wouldnt run. i installed the game on my lads computer and ran ok. disc ok. it didnt like the 9800 pro card even though it meets the minimum requirements. I then swapped the gfx cards again and also the psu's, he had the 420w psu from my raidmax case and i put the 550w qtec one in mine. his computer then ran ok playing games for an hour then the screen went blank. the computer was still powered on but no signal to monitor, a slight improvement but the 9800 pro was still hot. went back to my computer wouldnt even post and just beeped at me. By a process of elimination the computer only booted up with sata drive and gfx card connected. As soon as i connected any other device it failed to boot. Diagnosis - poorly/cr*p psu.
in summary though, i have ordered a new case with 450w psu :
Arctic Cooling T2 Silentium Silent Midi Tower Case - 450W Seasonic Silent PSU (CA-001-AR)
This case should arrive today and i can sort my computer out and play GTA:SA ok (i hope). I will then use my old case which has more space and fans etc, put the original psu back in and transfer all my lads computer bits into that and MAYBE it sort the 9800 pro heat problem. If not then i may have to get another new x1600 for him as i know it works fine.
I think that covers it all, a few lessons learnt but my faith in computers has been severely dented. More news to come soon.
