HELP - Computer failure - Motherboard needs replacement?

F

fishbulb

New Member
So for the past 3 or 4 months my computer randomly freezes going to some websites, a few are hotmail, imdb, sparknotes, and ebay. Thinking that it was a Windows XP problem, i installed vista, but the problem still existed. Then all of a sudden it would get stuck at the boot screen. I'd let it sit for a little bit and it load fine, but it would use onboard video instead of my nVidia 6600 GT PCI-E video card. Again, i'd let it sit for a while and even that would be fine. I went back to XP but it would not find my SATA harddrive in which i install windows onto. I have a IDE harddrive for my documents/music/videos and the other SATA one for programs. After some screwing with it, it saw it and i continued to install WinXP, but still my computer froze while going to a select few websites but the video card stopped going out which was good.

Everything was fine until tonight when no audio devices could be detected (i use onboard sound by the way). I looked through device manager, tried reinstalling the drivers but neither solved the problem. Somewhere in there it would say that the bootmanager could not be found. That was solved by reinstalling XP. Later on it could not find NTLDR and i had to reinstall XP again because i think it switched the letters of my drives for some odd reason.

All of these problems point, in my opinion, to motherboard failure but i'm not sure. I definitely do not want to buy a motherboard and later find out that it is a power cable or something simpler than a whole new motherboard.

Specs on computer:
MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLi
2 6600GT PCI-E video cards
AMD 3000+, 1.8 GHz
1 Gig of RAM

If it helps, i am also running dual displays, one LCD Viewsonic Digital monitor and another CRT analog monitor.

I am sorry if is int he wrong forum, move it it necessary and i would really appreciate any help.

Cheers.
 
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Hmmm...this is tough. Just to throw this out there, I have that same mobo....
I would suggest you try flashing your BIOS, it may solve some issues. Go here: http://www.msicomputer.com/support/bios_result.asp and select "AMD" from the first drop down menu, then select "K8N Neo4 Platinum SLI", then follow all applicable instructions.
 
Thanks for the reply, i tried flashing the bios, but nothing changed.

Something i failed to mention is that when i try to open volume control in Windows, it says "No mixer devices available." I searched the internet and found that everybody else who had the problem only had to reinstall drivers to fix it. I tried reinstalling mine many times and it says that "no supported products could be found." and the only options it gives me is to cancel or search again.

So this leads me to believe that it is hardware related, but i'm obviously no expert on the situation.

Any information/comments/concerns/sympathy is always accepted.
 
I had a problem like that when I deleted my sound drivers I used the disk that came with the motherboard try that and see if it loads sound drivers
 
My brother had an old Sould Blaster Live! laying around so i took that and everything is running great for the time being.

Anybody hear if this will eventually lead to motherboard failure though?
 
Hmmmmm. Perhaps your motherboard battery is going dead. Batteries are cheap. Put in a new one. You'll clear cmos when you do, so you'll have to configure the bios for optimum (or to your liking). You could be dumping your bios settings. Oops, forgot to ask you: Are you getting a checksum error on boot?

Bronson7
 
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