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On Sat, 19 Jun 2004 19:19:41 -0400, "Paul D. Motzenbecker, Jr."
wrote: Don, Greetings and hallucinations from just north of Fantasy Land (Washington, DC)! Hi Paul, Greetings from Minnesota! :) What, pray tell, were you trying to fix? Flash a BIOS only to cure a problem. Flashing to just have the lastest and greatest is courting the bitch Goddess Disaster with red roses, GodivaŽ chocolates and a 10 karet water white flawless diamond from Tiffany's. With that on offer she is sure to pay you a call. You will find that she is a lousy date. I realize that it's not a good idea to flash the bios 'just because'. That's why I was still at 1003 until I updated this board to 1007 in preparation for a new SATA drive I had ordered. I had read that the 1007 included improvements to the SATA bios. I suppose my mistake was in not just seeing how well the 1003 handled the SATA drive. That being said, have you reinstalled the nVidia drivers for the board? Sometimes they get confused when the BIOS is changed. This I haven't done. Wasn't sure whether to reinstall the ASUS version or go ahead and try installing the nVidia reference ones over the ASUS version. I really have no idea how to uninstall the ASUS so it'd be an install over them if I went that way. Since I posted the message and responses below, I've done a few more things. I've uninstalled the video drivers and reinstalled new ones that came out the day I was updating the drivers. :) After unchecking the "Restart on Error" option in WinXP, I had one crash to the BSOD where it pointed to an ATI file as the problem. I've also had the system STILL completely reboot, and one occurrence where it appeared all that happened was I lost the video. My LCD went blank, yet the computer seemed to still be running. I tried timing the reboots. It appears the first one occurs around 1 hour, to 1:10. The second one around 20 minutes later. (This was while in-game, playing DAoC. The only crash I've had out of the game was after five hours of playing MP3s with Winamp while playing Kyodai Mahjonng.) When I opened the case and directed a fan on the innards, I was able to put the reboot back to another hour. I suspected heat problems with the video card, but it felt merely warm to the touch after these reboots (as far as the ram chips,anyway. Wasn't able to touch the actual GPU obviously). ASUS Probe shows the MB and CPU temps to be around 30C and 40C max. Usually about 27 and 35 or so, so I don't think the CPU is overheating. I blew out the case in case dust was a problem. I didn't really see any standing dust on the CPU or Video card (though I am unable to extract my dust filter from the front of my Antec Sonata case. After a few attempts at pressing on tabs and pulling the filter out, both tabs broke and the filter hasn't budged). I've ordered a new video card in case the 9700 Pro is failing, and a new power supply (current one is Antec 380), just in case the BIOS somehow caused the board to use a bit more juice. I admit, I have no idea if that's even possible, but it seemed that the problems only occurred when there was a lot of video activity so I leaned toward it being either the card actually going, or the card demanding a bit more juice and putting the PSU over the edge and causing a reset. In all cases, I am able to use the system immediately after one of these reboots, and there never is any weird graphical artifacts prior to a reboot. Sorry this got so long. I do thank all of you for reading and posting possible ideas. Peace, To you also, Paul Don My system is fairly plain: ASUS A7N8X Deluxe v2 1007 bios Athlon 2500+ Barton core 1g Kingston PC 2700 ram (as mentioned, passed memtest for 19 hours and 38 passes) ATI Radeon 9700 Pro 120GB WD IDE hard drive LiteOn DVD/CD-RW combo drive LiteOn 52x CD-RW drive Samsung Syncmaster 191T monitor "Don Reese" wrote in message .. . snipped Thanks for the information, Peter. I may wind up just reinstalling from scratch and using Nvidia drivers only. Ever since the bios flash, my computer has spontaneously rebooted while playing (in this case) Dark Age of Camelot. I never had this problem with the prior bios (1003). I haven't seen it happen while doing anything else, though, so I'm thinking perhaps an uninstall and reinstall of the video drivers may help. (One message after a reboot said the problem appears to be in the ati-something.drv so I'm thinking it's worth a shot.) I have an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro installed. Also, I noticed my monitor (Samsung 191T) is listed twice in the device manager. This may have been something that was there all along, but in this case I doubt it. That would be something easily noticed as I scanned the list every now and then. Should I delete one or both of these entries? Both say they are working correctly. In my post above I mentioned people having trouble with sound drivers. I guess I should have said, I read they had problems with the control panel and not being able to access it after installing Nvidia drivers over the ASUS ones. If you've had no problems, I may yet give it a try. Thanks to all who have helped so far. I appreciate it. Don Although I have an older board (1.04), I also have the 5 memory controller items using the 1007 BIOS. Nothing says Ultra though. I'm using the latest nVidia platform drivers (version 4.24) and the current ATI drivers (version 4.6) for my Radeon 9500. I'm using the same monitor as you, but it only shows up once. However, the display device shows up twice, but that's normal for this graphic card. Yes, once for primary and once for secondary. When I flash my BIOS, I always boot from a floppy with no drivers on it, but with awdflash.exe and the BIOS file. I then flash the BIOS using the command: awdflash AN8D1007.BIN BIOS.OLD /py /sy /cd /cp /cc /LD /E This was the first time I tried the 'automatic' method. The process itself didn't leave a very good taste in my mouth, what with no message at the end that the flash was complete - just a reboot and a couple beeps and the 1007 showing as the current bios on the boot screen. This wipes out the old settings, saves the current BIOS as "bios.old" and then flashes the BIOS. You need to reboot and finally re-set all your BIOS settings to the way you want it. I've never had a problem doing it this way. Sam Thanks, Sam. I'll try reflashing the bios after whittling down my monitor entries to one. Here are the things I've done so far to try track down the cause of the random rebooting since flashing 1007: 1.Uninstalled old Radeon Drivers and control panel. 2. Installed new drivers (newest at the time, 4.5) and control panel Computer still crashed. 3. Unchecked the option in System Properties to automatically reboot on error. Hopefully when it happens again I'll be able to see on the BSOD what caused it. 4. Ran memtest86 for 19 hours. No errors on 38 passes. I'm now about to go remove one of the monitor entries in the Device Manager to see if that makes a difference. If not, I'll reflash the bios using the method you mentioned. Thanks to everyone who is trying to help with this. Your information is very much appreciated. Don -- Don Reese -- Don Reese |
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