Well excuse me for going totally geek here and saying a lot of stuff that none will understand unless they are a nerdy as I am.
Ok, now about a month and a half ago i spent $400 to upgrade my PC. The reason i did this is because i had a dell and it didn't have any PCIe or AGP slots in it. I was stuck with onboard graphics and I wanted to play "The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion". Now I took the time to find all the components i needed. Because of this situation i needed a graphics card , a mother board, and a case to make it complete. Those were necessity and after getting everything and running just fine at boot i thought i was fine.
Well I was wrong. I ran into problems when getting parts. Mainly the mother board because it had to be a 478 socket (Intel chipset) which has been outdated twice since I got my Dell two years ago. The major problem i had was availability since it's not a current form of technology.
In the end I bought the PT8CE-A from Fry's electronics. Working with a limited choice i had no alternative options that were that great and i was on a budget. 478 boards are cheep today anyway so it was only $30 and it helped me with conserving cash and buying a quality case and cooling components as well as my GPU.
My problems started about a week after the machine was up and running. Random restarts, freezes, and blue-screens began to plague me. I've been looking into the issue and several people have had the same issues as i have. According to ECS the MB manufacturer they swear it's not their hardware it's windows being less than agreeable. They say this even though i suspected windows first and have exhausted all possibilities that it's being the problem. Additionally the blue-screens tell me a serious hardware malfunction has stopped the system.
I've tried to fix this through many methods including flashing the BIOS with no success. From what i can tell so far it's most likely the ram. I suspect that the board is incapable of running a stable environment even though it says it can support the ram speeds i have installed. I'm still not sure since i haven't solved the problems yet.
What's odd about this is that my system can run like the wind and not trip or become short of breath. With Oblivion kicked up to it's highest settings (which is the default as the game decided) I have no hiccups no lag nothing. Even though it can do this my PC is incapable of crawling or merely walking. I'll be online checking my mail and it'll just reboot for no reason. I can also be nowhere near the PC and it'll freeze while idle and doing nothing.
This causes major problems because my working environment is totally useless for working on projects. I can't do anything productive on my PC anymore because i could loose a large amount of work very instantly. It can go so far as to reboot while I save and wipe out all the work i have done ever to the file.
Building a PC may be fun but when your dealing with outdated technology like this it can be more trouble than it's worth.
---CP Out---
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