New Pc Old Problem??

[Craigo]

A friend of mine purchased a new PC.
Pentium D 2.8 GHz cpu
1 Gig of Ram
160 Gig IDE HDD
DVD Burner
Internal card reader
O/S Windows Media Centre

It is a phillips brand.

After having it for a week it started "playing up"
He rang the place where he got it from and they sent a tech out to "fix" the problem.

After about another week it starts freezing during boot/ and normal use.

I take a look at it for him and remove the HDD to Scan from my PC for Virus and find that the MB partition was corrupt. So I repair that from The windows disk and within five minutes of working (after scanning it with panda) its MB partition is corrupt again!

So I format and re-install windows same problem still.

So I replace with brand new 250 Gig HDD and it runs sweet for three days and now is showing the same symptoms that it started out with. GGGGGGRRRRRRRRR . By now I am really frustrated and very confused. What would be causing this problem?? If anyone out there knows please help me as I am stuck and it is doing my head in.

[liljim]

[Craigo]

[Craigo]

[Craigo]

If I cant fix it I guess I can feed it to my dog!

[Gecko]

The fact that the MBR has been corrupted on both HHDs that have been in this system is not good.
It makes me think it could be a bad stick of ram causing the problem.

Try downloading
Choose you flavor of bootable device, floppy or CD and download the file for that media.
Boot the system from your chosen media and let it run for a couple of hours, if you get any errors then it is bad ram.

If the system has more than one stick of ram then try removing one stick and retest with memtest 86.

[icecube]

Another thing that can cause the operating system to go haywire like this is to forget to install the motherboard drivers. Its very simple to overlook and its very unforgiving, the results are not immediate.

[Craigo]

OK Thankyou I will try memtest and check all of the drivers. How do you mean very unforiving?

[Craigo]

[liljim]

replace the bad memory and install all the motherboard drivers to start. Then you need to boot from the xp cd and enter the recovery console. Choose your windows directory, number 1 is usually the only option then press enter. Enter the administrator password if it has one, if not just press enter again. At the command prompt type FIXMBR and press enter. Reboot to windows and enjoy.

[Craigo]

Yep I know that much. I had had to FIXMBR last time.

Can someone please tell me.... Can not installing motherboard drivers have caused this problem??

[Gecko]

[Craigo]

I replaced ram still the same problem. I have got the specs on the motherboard and i am going to download the latest drivers for it and make sure that they are for media centre xp. This has got me beat. I guess that I should try taking all of the cards out aswell and see how it runs with out them?

[Gecko]

[icecube]

What I meant by unforgiving is that the programs start or rather stop working right and things lock up all of the time. It usually takes a couple of days for it to get bad enough to be visible.

In your case, since this is a new build, I would examine the motherboard. Check each capacitor by trying to wiggle it gently, they should all be firm.

On some boards they stick up in the wrong places and/or can get whacked
by the installer. Once you have a loose or leaking capacitor, you end up with problems like you describe.

As Gecko suggested the memory is probably the culprit.

Another issue you might check, is to see if the CPU fan is mounted flat to the CPU- Lack of full contact could produce a heat issue that could really mess things up.