Vista - New build, vista home premium 64 bit freezing/crashing

Hi,

I finished building my first computer this morning, and installed vista home premium 64 OEM to finish it off.

Specs are:

Asus P5N E SLI
8600GT
Corsair 4gb 800mhz
q6600 Quad Core

I've updated the bios to the latest version, and have put all drivers on but Vista keeps crashing. It freezes for no apparent reason. I've been using Vista HP (32) on my 2yr old laptop with no problems (I'm using it to type to you all now), and I'm lost as to what is wrong. I've had a very brief look around and it sounds like another user on here has had a similar problem, but as I've just built the whole system I'm wondering if there's anything I've missed which is causing it to crash/freeze/generally be unresponsive?

Any help would be hugely appreciate, thanks in advance.

Hello alexi, welcome to Vista forums!

Some have had issues installing 64-bit Vista with more than 2GB of RAM installed.
I am told it depends on the MoBo, (not sure what ones).
Try installing with just 2GB in, then add the rest later.

Hopefully others will have more to say on this for you.

Keep us informed!




Later Ted

My first guess is to look over the hardware.

-Did you have enough power supply to run your system?
-Do you have good ventilation in the case?
-Is the heat sink mounted on your processor good?
-Have you ran memtest on your memory?

Hi, thanks for the response Ted.

I'll try that later as a last resort, would rather not reinstall yet...

----

rtt_77388

It's a 500W PSU, I've been told that should be fine
ventilation is good, core is 41 deg atm.
Haven't run mem test yet, how do I do that?

Thank you both


EDIT: Curiously, my Vista experience rating is currently at 1.0 because of my graphics... I'm going to reinstall the graphics card driver and see what that does.

Testing the RAM is a good idea. Just burn this to a CD and boot into it.
It would be best to check each stick individually and let each one run a full pass.

Memtest86.com - Memory Diagnostic









Later Ted

Hello alexi.

I get the same thing everytime I re-install, untill I click on "Update My Score" in "Performance Information".

Window Experience Index Scores


Later Ted

Well I tried installing the graphics card driver anyway, and it froze again.
Am running the memtest as we speak, do i just leave it until it does anything in particular?
Thanks again

Just let it continue until it completes a full pass, then do the next stick.
In my experience one full pass takes about two hours to complete.
(kind of like watching grass grow)

Keep us informed!


Later Ted

I'm assuming that by "installed all drivers" you mean you used the CD that came with the board and installed every driver that came with it? If so, included in that package is the nasty nVidia SATA driver.

The nVidia SATA driver causes a lot of issues like this and there seems to be no readily available fix; some updates work for some guys, not for others.

If you have the nVidia SATA driver installed I would get rid of it asap. Go to the device manager, expand IDE ATA/ATAPI and look for the NVIDIA Controller. Highlight it and select properties, then go to the driver tab. If the Driver Provider is nVidia, then this driver is most likely causing you, like coutless others, your issues. Uninstall it and allow the machine to load the Windows driver, reboot. Go back to the same place and make sure that the Driver Provider is Microsoft.

Before you uninstall the driver, make sure to turn off automatic updates. Apparently (just helped some guy with this same issue last week) Vista silently updates the Nvidia SATA driver, and installs one that isn't correct. Not sure if "this week" things have changed, but it's better to be safe than sorry.

Not to get off topic here, but dmex wrote this tutorial about
"Device Manager" some may not know about, that came in handy for me.

Ghost Devices & Drivers









Later Ted