First post, by tayyare
- Rank
- Oldbie
My PIII W9x rig, the retro machine that I used and loved most, originally had an Asus V8460 Ultra Deluxe )GF4 Ti 4600) and a Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold. Now both of them (actually two Sound Blasters AWE64s) have problems and not working.
Yesterday, while making a routine cleaning, I dropped a screw inside the machine. It went missing into some place mysterious, and I took the machine up, hold it up side down and shake a bit strongly to drop the screw (it dropped). After putting back all the cables and such, I restarted the machine in Windows 98, but it hanged there just before going into the login screen. So I rebooted in safe mode, see a lot of artifacts, started to panic, rebooted it into w2k, and seen the artifacts there, too.
I took the card out, reseated, and it worked... for a while.... then the frozen windows in stupid monochrome like colors and artifacts again during restart. I took apart the cooler, cleaned and applied new thermal paste... artifacts again, hang during starting up windows again.
So I fall back to a Ti 4200, the machine works perfectly. There is no visual damage or caps gone bad. The below are the windows 98 and 2000 start up and 2000 login screens (98 juct hangs, so no login screen). Any ideas?
The problem with SB AWE64s is more easy to tell. The first one was working correctly one day, and stopped working the other day. BIOS did not recognize it as a PNP card during boot up. Actually it is not recognized by anything at anytime. Both computer and windows just behaves as there is no card in there. The second one was again working perfectly one day, then it started outputting sound from left channel only. There is nothing on right channel (of course I checked speakers and cables).
Either of these cards were beloved parts of my PIII rig. Now I had no spare AWE64s, so I fall back to a Value PNP. I think I can never afford one again with 100+ USD price tags.
Any ideas?
GA-6VTXE PIII 1.4+512MB
Geforce4 Ti 4200 64MB
Diamond Monster 3D 12MB SLI
SB AWE64 PNP+32MB
120GB IDE Samsung/80GB IDE Seagate/146GB SCSI Compaq/73GB SCSI IBM
Adaptec AHA29160
3com 3C905B-TX
Gotek+CF Reader
MSDOS 6.22+Win 3.11/95 OSR2.1/98SE/ME/2000