Computer Stability Degradation

Graueradler

Graueradler

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Graueradler
My computer has been very stable for a long time, ever since I fdisked the hard drive, reloaded Windows XP and started all over. Initially, I had installed XP as an upgrade from 98 and it was quite unstable. It is a home built that is several years old with an ASUS motherboard and a 450 mHz AMD CPU (it was fast once upon a time). In the day after Thanksgiving sales, I found a deal I couldn't refuse and bought a 200 GB Maxtor HD for $30. Last week, I installed it. The first problem I encountered was that I didn't have a cable long enough to reach from the mother board to where it had to be installed in a large tower. No problem, I had a spare small case so I just moved the entire computer to a new case (including the new HD). It now has three hard drives and a CD-ROM reader/burner. I could only use 137 GB of the new drive due to system limitations but that will last me a long time. Since then, the computer has been generally OK but programs (Outlook Express/Firefox, etc) keep crashing now and then and closing themselves. Firefox has shut down twice tonight but comes back up without re-booting. I normally shut down by "Hibernating" but when I have a program problem, I shutdown completely and restart and the problem seems to be gone until maybe it burps again a day or so later.

I am not a computer guru. I am an engineer than can read a product manual, figure out where to connect wires and how to set jumpers and have taken a few programming classes and a computer design class (Motorola Z something or other chip) many years ago.

Any suggestions? (other than get a new modern computer)
 
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"It now has three hard drives and a CD-ROM reader/burner"

I'd be wondering about the power supply handling all that load. If you've got a 200Gig drive in there ... why do you need 3?

Take a bit of the load off (say 2 HD's) and see if your problems go away.

Another take is to check for spyware/virus/adware and the like. They can do nasty things.

google to find spybot search and destroy, ad aware, avg antivirus.

all free, all good.

Brett
 
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For that matter - what's the power rating on the power supply currently?

As for not being able to use the full size - there are usually utilities for drives that big that allow you to partition them to appear as two, smaller drives. Check with the HD manufacturer.
 
How much RAM do you have? XP is resource intensive. With a lot of paging (memory transfering back and forth to the HDD), it's not unusual to see all kinds of weird issues, especially with a slower system. The more RAM you have, the less paging (although it never really goes away for some reason).

You might consider upgrading the motherboard/processor/RAM combination. Everything else should still work and, if you get a motherboard with the driver CD, you won't have to re-install XP (it will complain like heck at first but you should be able to get everything going again with the driver CD and some tweaking). Some places offer bundles for a few hundred bucks at the most.
 
Greebo said:
For that matter - what's the power rating on the power supply currently?

As for not being able to use the full size - there are usually utilities for drives that big that allow you to partition them to appear as two, smaller drives. Check with the HD manufacturer.
Click to expand...
If your BIOS/motherboard do not support 48 bit LBA (logical block addressing) you will be stuck at 137 gig (137,438,952,960 bytes)

If you get 48 bit LBA you are up to:
144,115,188,075,855,360 bytes

You can pickup a PCI IDE controller with 48 bit support for about $20 these days. Plug that into an IDE slot and hook the hard drive up to it..and you are rolling.
 
I'll open the case and check the power supply size. What size should be adequate? I have a spare 275W if the installed one isn't big enough. The computer has slightly under 200 megs of memory I think 196 is what I see on the start up memory test. I'm sure expanding that would speed the computer up and possibly improve its stability. I wasn't worried about not being able to use the full 200 gig of new HD. There are surely controller cards I can get to let me use all of it if and when I need it. Would partitioning the new drive as two 100 gig drives allow the present system to handle it. The Maxtor CD program didn't suggest that. It just said that the system couldn't handle 200 and partitioned the drive as a single 137 gig partition. I could easily re-partition it. I don't need three HDs. I could copy the old primary slave to the new drive and remove the old one if that might improve the stability.
 
The computer has slightly under 200 megs of memory I think 196 is what I see on the start up memory test.
Click to expand...
Probably 196608 which amounts to 192 MB (1024 * 192).

YOU.
NEED.
RAM.

For Windows XP, 256 I believe is the MINIMUM, and 512 is Recommended. In my world, 512 is the minimum and 1 gig is recommended.

For 3 HD's and a CD, I'd want a 300W power supply.

And like someone said earlier, a $20 IDE controller card will support the disk, but with your system being as old as it is, you may not be able to find a controller to fit in your system. I'm guessing you're still ISA and not even PCI?
 
You can't partition it up differentely. It's not a limit of the filesystem, it's a limit of your BIOS being unable to address that much of the drive.

You need to get a PCI IDE Controller card that supports 48 bit LBA.
 
is several years old with an ASUS motherboard and a 450 mHz AMD CPU
Click to expand...
IF its PCI capable, I might be surprised, with only a 450, I'm expecting ISA or EISA.
 
More memory should make a difference.

IIRC, with cacheing, a larger hard drive will want more memory, depending on the block size and format type.
 
Has 3 PCI slots and 2 ISA slots. ASUS P5A Motherboard has "an onboard PCI bus master IDE controller that supports 4 IDE devices in two channels, supports UltraDMA/33, PIO modes 3 & 4 and bus master IDE DMA mode 2, and supports enhanced IDE devices such as ...."

Gues I need to start looking for some more memory. I'm pretty sure that I confirmed that the memory available exceeded the minimum requirement at the time but there have been lots of updates to XP since it came out. The board will support up to 756 mb.
 
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Greebo said:
IF its PCI capable, I might be surprised, with only a 450, I'm expecting ISA or EISA.
Click to expand...

You are pretty much going to be seeing PCI starting as early as 486es.. 166 mhz + machines will for SURE have PCI..

450 Mhz machines you are getting into the land of PCI & AGP.
 
As I tell my clients ... remember that the "Minimum Requirements" are the bare minimum needed to make the OS boot up ... not to make it do anything useful.

The "minimum requirements" for your 20 mile commute to work is a 1962 Ford Falcon with mis-matched colored doors. There is a reason you don't see too many of them on the road. :D

I also have an AMD 450 at home ... but I wouldn't put a whole lot of time or $ into yours. You can likely buy a good used machine with more memory and a 3X faster processor for less than you'll spend on the extra memory alone. And =then= you'll be able to use the entire 200 gigs, AND have a spare machine to boot.

http://www.isellsurplus.com/

Bobby Day said:
Has 3 PCI slots and 2 ISA slots. ASUS P5A Motherboard has "an onboard PCI bus master IDE controller that supports 4 IDE devices in two channels, supports UltraDMA/33, PIO modes 3 & 4 and bus master IDE DMA mode 2, and supports enhanced IDE devices such as ...."

Gues I need to start looking for some more memory. I'm pretty sure that I confirmed that the memory available exceeded the minimum requirement at the time but there have been lots of updates to XP since it came out. The board will support up to 756 mb.
Click to expand...
 
Installed power supply was only 200W. I installed the 275W spare that I had and am back up and running. Now lets see if I get my stability back. It this makes the necessary improvement in stability, I'll just leave it alone untill I see some super sale on memory. This computer isn't worth spending any money on. I saw a new one today at Staples for a little over $300 ($330?) including monitor.
 
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Before you buy a new one, post the stats on what you find. I highly doubt Staples will be your cheapest option, nor a good source of support. Give us a price and stats (cpu, memory, drives, other features) and I'll do some price comparing for you, both on canned and homebuilts.
 
Thanks for the offer. I may exercise it down the road. Hopefully, the old one I have will straighten up and fly right. I don't have much time on it since replacing the power supply but so far, no glitches. I wasn't really seriously considering buying the one from Staples. From what I remember, it was a Compaq with 256 meg of memory, a 100 gig HD, modem and a 17" CRT monitor. I would expect though that just buying a new mother board and CPU would probably be around $200. In the past when I've gone that route, I usually had to buy some other new cards too because the old ones were no longer supported by the new mother board or had been integrated in the previous mother board. I've been satisfied with this old computer until I stumbled over that $30 200 gig HD. Putting it in seemed to have started some problems but, hopefully, it was the inadequate power supply. I didn't think about power supply capacity when I migrated the computer from one case to the other.

I just can't believe how far computers have progressed. The first one I ever worked with on the job was called a "Nova" and had a whole 4K of memory. Everyone was marvelling at how small it was and how it was faster and had more memory than the vacuum tube computer they had used to design a nuclear reactor core for the Savannah. My first personal one was a Radio Shack basic language progamable pocket computer (still have it, also still have my slide rule). Then we had a networked 4 station Wang system for work in the office and even bought a few of the over $300 TI-35s that now sell for about $10.

I wouldn't say that I'm getting old but "Graueradler" is German for "Gray Eagle"
 
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