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...

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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.

Originally Posted by Bare Foot Kid

Originally Posted by alexi

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.

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

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.