Si_GTi Posted April 10, 2005 Report Share Posted April 10, 2005 Hi guys and girls, It might be time for me to replace my aged but trusty (so far) computer... since yesterday, on bootup, it takes 3-4 minutes to pick up the memory and move on to detect the attached IDE drives, whereas normally it would take seconds! Current specs: AMD Athlon 850 512MB PC133 SDRAM (2x 256MB modules) Windows XP Professional w/ SP2 80GB HDD 50x CD-Rom drive LG GCC-4210B CDRW/DVD combo drive ABIT Radeon 9600XT 256MB AGP graphics Soundblaster Live! PCI soundcard Realtek NIC PCI ethernet adaptor The machine is about 4-5 yrs old, I've been upgrading bits and pieces here and there (HDD, graphics, sound) but have been seriously considering buying a barebones bundle PC from Novatech and swapping my graphics and soundcard over to a new system (would buy a brand-new HDD too). Maybe its time to go buy it! Besides, I can't play CounterStrike Source on this system, its slow as buggery! Anyway, in my own experience this memory detection issue is usually a hardware problem - I'm gonna open up the case later, give it all a good clean and re-seat the two memory modules and see if that helps. But to be honest I don't hold out much hope, I think I may well go shopping - in the meantime I'm gonna start making some new backups just in case! Anything else I can do to try and resolve this? Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Belchy Posted April 10, 2005 Report Share Posted April 10, 2005 Firmware? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
danksy Posted April 10, 2005 Report Share Posted April 10, 2005 If I were going to be buying or building a new one, I think I'd go for a Media Centre of joy! I saw a mate's in action, and was very impressed! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gaunty Posted April 10, 2005 Report Share Posted April 10, 2005 Have you inadvertently switched on the long power on self test (POST) setting in the bios? This would make it check all of your memory when its booting and would take about this length of time. If not then the first thing I would do is reseat the memory chips, take them out and put them back in, if this doesn't help then take them both out and try them one at a time to see which chip is affected. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Si_GTi Posted April 10, 2005 Author Report Share Posted April 10, 2005 Thanks guys, The pint and slap on the back goes to Gaunty this time! I opened up the case to find that there was a load of dust coating one of the memory chips. Of the three available slots on my mainboard, I use the middle one and the one nearest the chipset/heatsink/fan combo, leaving one empty slot nearest the edge of the board. The chip nearest the fan and chipset etc was caked in dust, so whipped 'em out, cleaned them up and reseated the chips, this time leaving the dusty memory slot empty and using the other empty slot nearest the edge of the board Long story short, rebooted and no pause to detect memory, everything seems OK now! Still gonna back things up, its about time I did, and look to buy a new computer before summer's out Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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