A nightmare in time. (PC related-not dream)

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Elite Baiter Joined: 02 Jul 2006 Posts: 1702

My graphics card bit the dust, i knew it was going for a while, cheap 20 quid nvidea didnt expect much from it and it lived up to its expectation and promptly and suddenly died.

Anyway I got myself a great deal a radeon x1650 for 30 quid, again its not a great card, but at least it works till i can decide to go for a top end one again.

After i installed the card, i reset the bios - to make sure the board was running the card at a lower clock speed its rated 200mhz i like to slightly underclock it adds massive stability.

Then i rebooted windows, and some updates needed doing. So quickly got those out of the way - and said suddenly and loudly "Bollxxxx" i remembered only at that moment the time would be 1 jan 2007. First me antivirus goes into an ever revolving crash, then the os begins to swiss cheese, outlook deletes all email (after 1 jan 2007) and it begins to slowly unravel and collapse.

If you do reset the clock MAKE DAMN SURE you dont forget to redo it BEFORE booting windows, even a single boot with the wrong time is enough to start a major crash.

It took me 6 hours to rescue enough to be able to completely flatten that machine and re-install, repair failled "File is older than the os"

Oh and for rule of thumb NEVER purchase a Nvidea 7500le the forceware kills them in a few weeks.

Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2008 12:51 pm

My sympathies D1, know the feeling.

I had a 1 Gig memory stick throw in the towel a while back. The symptoms were pretty much like a failed power supply.
When I initially replaced the power supply, the system rebooted and run checkdisk for a short time before dying again, and indicated many crosslinked files. I have never discovered why the above events triggered checkdisk and trashed data.
I lost email, fax history and many documents. I never thought a failed memory stick would do that. Once the memory was replaced, the system settled down OK, but required a lot of time to restore the hard drive contents.

Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2008 5:18 am

^^^
Perhaps the failed memory stick is not the cause, but another symptom. There are plenty of things that will affect both RAM and hard drive - power supply problems spring to mind. Losing files such as you describe make it sound unlike a purely RAM issue..

Elite Baiter Joined: 02 Jul 2006 Posts: 1702

Overall ive been lucky, i dont have much go wrong with xp and machines, an odd card here or there is normal wear and tear to me, i have one machine with vista on it by default - its now my dust collector > Smile

I did once spend �2500 on a machine - it lasted 6 months after that i kinda grew to wait till high power cost peanuts - a 512mb 800mhz card can be as cheap as 44 quid for a nvidea 6500gt - that on a good board with 2gb ram will run oblivion smoothly - thats my benchmark lol. - as the 30 quid unbranded card can do the same - i expect it to last about 4 - 6 months but its not a false economy - because in 4-6 months the higher cards will have dropped too - thus i might be a little behind top end but always end up with it.

Posted: Sun Jan 27, 2008 10:19 pm

Well if you need a decent card to go with, I recommend the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT. I can really recommend it.

Posted: Mon Jan 28, 2008 10:39 pm

^^^8600? bah, ya might as well go with an 8800, its not that much more expensive but it's a beast and it shouldn't have to be replaced for quite a while

Posted: Mon Jan 28, 2008 11:50 pm

Well he might not be able to afford an 8800 Its one hundred dollars more, but he won't need it like you or I. An 8600 is a decent medium to high level compromise. It can run most games brilliantly.

Baiting Guru Joined: 04 Jan 2006 Posts: 3193

GordonBennett wrote:

Losing files such as you describe make it sound unlike a purely RAM issue..

The disk buffers will have been on that RAM. So every disk write, to every file and every folder will have been compromised. It is not at all surprising.

digital_one wrote:

even a single boot with the wrong time is enough to start a major crash.

Damn. Someone needs to give that programmer a right good LARTing. There is no way that a bad clock should cause all that mayhem. You need to upgrade to Windows 2000 (or Linux Wink

).

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