Gigabyte DS4, Enermax Liberty 650, 2Gb XMS2, Conroe 6600, 8800GT - all at stock.
Last night while playing the HL2 mod, Zombie Panic (occasionally a good laugh if you haven't tried it) my PC did the usual Source sound stutter, lockup. Not that unusual (happily it occurs much less frequently now I'm using X-Fi not onboard sound). There's only one solution, which is a hard reset. Done this loads of times before. And then...
... no POST. It'd get as far as recognising the CPU, and then start the mem test only to freeze with the legend "Memory T.." onscreen.
Right, I thought. Something's buggered. Then began a process of checking and prodding connections, disconnecting non-essential drives etc, and swapping out RAM sticks (quite difficult to do at 1am without waking everyone up). No dice. So my attention turned to the BIOS; I shorted the pins to clear the CMOS, and tried again. This time I ended up frozen on some strange Gigabyte pre-post screen, but I had no keyboard control. Ie, the machine still wasn't POSTing far enough to let me do anything.
At this point I was getting a bit worried, cos while it may be Zombies by night this is my work machine by day. Out of sheer tryanythingitmightworkism I pulled all the cables out the back save monitor, keyboard and mouse (basically I removed some USBs that were either connected to devices not switched on, or weren't connected to anything).
Ding... back in the strange Gigabyte screen, only this time I have keyboard control. I have a machine back. Got into Windows, it let me check email then locked up in IE while scrolling. Reboot again... and now everything's fine.
So: this has been long and rambling, and I'm glad I fixed the problem, but... I don't actually know what the problem was. So I'm wondering what any of you lot think
-abc
Last night while playing the HL2 mod, Zombie Panic (occasionally a good laugh if you haven't tried it) my PC did the usual Source sound stutter, lockup. Not that unusual (happily it occurs much less frequently now I'm using X-Fi not onboard sound). There's only one solution, which is a hard reset. Done this loads of times before. And then...
... no POST. It'd get as far as recognising the CPU, and then start the mem test only to freeze with the legend "Memory T.." onscreen.
Right, I thought. Something's buggered. Then began a process of checking and prodding connections, disconnecting non-essential drives etc, and swapping out RAM sticks (quite difficult to do at 1am without waking everyone up). No dice. So my attention turned to the BIOS; I shorted the pins to clear the CMOS, and tried again. This time I ended up frozen on some strange Gigabyte pre-post screen, but I had no keyboard control. Ie, the machine still wasn't POSTing far enough to let me do anything.
At this point I was getting a bit worried, cos while it may be Zombies by night this is my work machine by day. Out of sheer tryanythingitmightworkism I pulled all the cables out the back save monitor, keyboard and mouse (basically I removed some USBs that were either connected to devices not switched on, or weren't connected to anything).
Ding... back in the strange Gigabyte screen, only this time I have keyboard control. I have a machine back. Got into Windows, it let me check email then locked up in IE while scrolling. Reboot again... and now everything's fine.
So: this has been long and rambling, and I'm glad I fixed the problem, but... I don't actually know what the problem was. So I'm wondering what any of you lot think
-abc