First post, by tomoya97
- Rank
- Newbie
So a couple of years ago I got a deal on a Slot A 900MHz Athlon (Thunderbird core), Asus K7M Motherboard (HP OEM version) and 128MB PC100 RAM combo. The system was fairly stable under Windows 2000 and a SIS 6326 AGP video card, only crashing when trying to visit some modern websites, such as Facebook, last weekend I decided to move to Windows 98 SE (After a year of not using it at all) and added a 3DFX Voodoo3 1000 (AGP), and this is when the problems began, Windows would fail to detect my Optical Drive (Standard IDE ATAPI CD-ROM), even after installing the latest VIA drivers (both the BIOS and the 98 boot disk would detect it without any problem), both the IDE controllers and the PnP BIOS Extension have exclamation marks in the device manager (Code 10 and Code 2), and it always fails to shutdown, although there was this random time when everything worked flawlessly. GPU and CPU intensive tasks, such as games and benchmarks work flawlessly, no artifacts, no weird glitches, slowdowns, random crashes, etc... Yesterday it failed to boot for the first time, no video signal, beep code, floppy drive or HDD activity, nothing. I remove all expansion cards and storage devices, leaving just the CPU, GPU and RAM, tried other RAM modules and slots (It would give me the typical beep code if no RAM was installed), resit everything, tried my old video card, another monitor, another PSU, nothing. Then out of nowhere it booted just like normal, I reinstalled my Voodoo3, it failed to boot, power cycled once, and it booted flawlessly, added my storage devices and sound card, it failed to boot again, power cycled twice, it booted again. Now I need to power cycle it at least 4 or 5 times to make it boot (regardless of what video card I'm using), and after that I need to power cycle it AGAIN because it always freezes after detecting the IDE drives. I suspect that there's something wrong with the Southbridge, since the PCI slots were finicky from day one.
