Need Guidance!

Hi-

My 12 year old son built a computer about 6 months ago and seems to work great.....games, apps, whatever.

Zach and my wife decided to give me a Christmas gift of a box of parts from Newegg.....pretty much the same specs as his, except the motherboard and sound card.

I took off the week between Christmas and New Years and basically spent the whole entire time trying to get this rig to run.

I don't think it's hardware issues, just Vista 64 issues. Errors like, Ready Boost has stopped working, Superfetch has stopped working, Microsoft windows search has stopped working, windows modules installer has stopped working, windows host process (rundll32) has stopped working. Firefox occasionally crashes. I tried a repair install, then I reformatted it again. Back to the same errors, with a few blue screens here and there.

So, more to the point. I'd like to know if I reformat this rig, and I install Windows XP 32......do you see any apparent problems with the hardware?

Here's my specs:

ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe Wireless Motherboard
Two MSI NX8600GTS GeForce 256 meg 128 bit SLI Graphic cards
AMD 64 Dual Core processor
Apevia 680 watt pwr supply
Sound Blaster X-FI Xtremegamer Fatalitly prof series
Four one gb sticks of G.SKIL 240 pin DDR2 (I'll probably remove 2 gbs)
Creative 7.1 speaker setup
Apevia Cruiser case

All I need is MS office and a web browser. They gave me Call of Duty 4 as well, but it will not run on the computer.....lots of blue screens.

It's the thought that counts, but this gift is a pain in the A$$.

Should XP32 run OK?

Thanx!
John

ur specs seem fine...i would give vista one more shot...just get everything prepared to a new reformat...i would say u clear the CMOS first...take out the little battery in the motherboard for about 30 seconds and insert it again...then i would turn your computer back on..and do a complete clean install on vista...

about the firefox...no clue what it is..but mine occasionally crashes on yahoo.com...this started about 4 weeks ago and i havent really cared thus far...but i will let you know..

Give Vista ONE more chance!
and welcome to the forum Jacobe!

The issues you are describing have nothing to do with Vista64. Any OS with bad/poorly set up hardware will error on you.

Please make sure that your memory is seated properly, meaning, re-seat it. Also, run the memtest-x86 program to ensure that you have ZERO errors on a few passes of your memory. I'm not sure what's the latest version, but I've been using 3.3 very successfully.

DLLs crashing, programs crashing, IE, Firefox, games, what have you, even Win components are usually hardware related. And the biggest culprit is generally RAM.

Once you have your RAM straightened out, run ORTHOS (2-3 windows simultaneously, one stressing RAM, another CPU, etc.) for a few hours. If that doesn't crash or report any problems, you're set. Otherwise, it's back to the HARDWARE drawing board. You'll have to diag each component.. My suggestions above will take you only as far as ram and cpu, but your MB could be fried, maybe the video card.. Hard to tell, but RAM and CPU are most likely the problems.

Good luck, and tell us how it turns out..

Well, I reformatted and installed XP32....and everything worked great. Office 2007 worked great and loaded quickly. After a few days I load COD4 and it did not run well, not near the settings as my son's computer. Then it was a lot of BSOD video errors. I reinstalled different drivers, sometimes using driver cleaners in between. I ran PC Pitstop and my video performance was abysmal compared to my son's machine.

So we then reformatted and reinstalled Vista64. Loaded the latest drivers. PC Pitstop results were still poor compared to my son's computer. My results are higher when I have SLI disabled then enabled......if you can figure that out. I have the exact same video cards as my son.....we swapped them with the same results.

Any ideas? Is there some motherboard driver that could effect the video somehow? It's not the video cards, nor the drivers......any suggestions for our next move?