I skimmed through that whole mess. The problem is you have too many people giving you random advice. Now, I want you to understand that is one major downfall of building your own system. You take away the "it just works" part when building your own.
First off, no one is at all using any sort of standard troubleshooting method, instead they have you running all over the place like Michael Jackson with his hair on fire.
The RAM test was a good start. We can assume your RAM is good because it showed no errors. So, from here we will use what is called the 'process of elimination,' which is a very common and well used method of troubleshooting.
Now, the whole your 3D mark shows no improvement is most likely due to bloat, crappy coding or shotty drivers for your video card and in the OS.
The disk I/O errors you got when trying to install XP (I think that is what you were trying to do at one point) could be a bad cable, bad HD, bad optical drive. Unfortunately windows does not do any advanced logging so you have to use the trial and error method.
The fact that you have wiped your HD and loaded an OS clean tells me that most likely your cables are good, your drives are good, and your media is good, otherwise it would probably fail over and over again. The only difference is that XP fails and Vista doesn't.
I do have to ask this, did you patch and update Vista after install? This is very important, as many of those patches fix crap like this.
What OS is currently on the drive and is it bootable?
Well, Yeah... it does go right out the window doesn't it...
The thing is Vista and XP both fail, when I try to boot Vista, I get 'BOOTMGR is missing' and when I try to boot XP, I get 'Disc Read Error Has Occurred'... Both ask me to Ctrl + Alt + Del to restart. Or, as I have named it, Retard!
I didn't patch Vista, No. I installed my MOBO Drivers which asked me to restart so I did. Bad idea? I did notice on EVGA's Web Site it looked like they have some new ones, which may be different to the ones on my CD that came with the MOBO. So, maybe if I whack the internet on there first, get them, install 'em, don't restart, then patch Vista up, you think that may work?
I just don't get how it all happened in the first place...
I don't have an OS that is bootable at the moment.
Bob, Nope, My sis doesn't game, so she doesn't have Xfire. Sorry, man.
[email protected] is my Email, but I can't really check that as... I don't have a computer. You can always PM me on here if you want, I'll try and check them when I'm on my sis' laptop checking this thread.
Thanks for the advice so far, guys!
