Loyd's New Year - A Trio of Problem Systems
by Loyd Case on January 13, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
I should have known better. I’d read enough online posts to know that the in-place upgrade from XP to Vista can be problematic, particularly if your XP system registry has grown to huge proportions. My own personal experience with a Vista upgrade had been moderately successful, but even that system was eventually nuked and a clean Vista install performed.
So here was a PC, with lots of fairly useless (from my perspective), but fun (from her perspective) background tasks running under XP. In goes the Vista upgrade.
Did I mention that this system had 2GB of system RAM?
Within two weeks, her system had pretty much become unusable. I scanned it with several malware detectors, and other than complaints about a couple of adware items, there were no Trojans or viruses found. So the problem really came down to an already overloaded Windows XP system that had developed massive registry and hard drive bloat after the Vista in-place upgrade. So I decided to nuke and start over.
One of the cardinal rules of troubleshooting is: change only one variable at a time.
Unfortunately in my hubris, I ignored that rule. I put her system on the bench, swapped out 2GB of Kingston DDR3 RAM for a pair of Corsair 2GB DDR3 modules. I then swapped out the QX6850 for an E8500 3.16GHz dual core CPU.
When I powered the system up, I got no POST, but the fans spun up. Also, the PC beeper didn’t beep. This is, as anyone who has built systems will tell you, one of the most ambiguous and frustrating types of errors.
So I popped her old CPU back in and rebooted.
Same thing.
So I put the old memory back in, and the system POSTed properly. I checked her BIOS on the P5Q3 motherboard, and found out it was still running the 0704 BIOS. That BIOS predated Intel’s 45nm CPUs. On top of that, if you read the summaries of the various BIOS updates, you also see a number of them with text that reads “enchances compatibility with certain memory.”
Lessons (re)learned:
- Before upgrading CPUs or memory, check the BIOS version
- Never change more than one item of hardware at a time without testing it.
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pkoi - Wednesday, January 13, 2010 - link
too strange , did you repeat that? backward ?nicknomo - Wednesday, January 13, 2010 - link
I looked at computer #1, and I don't quite understand why you did any of that. That computer you had is far superior than anything I'm using.. The problems your daughter was having was in no way related to any of the solutions. Why not just try a repair installation of XP if you really wanted to fix the issue? Vista sure wasn't going to help at all. The hardware upgrades seem excessive, especially considering you were using pretty recent hardware to begin with.I'm not really in disagreement with the "what I learned" part of it. Yes, check your BIOS... don't do an in place upgrade if you can avoid it.. but, the lessons don't go with the problem..
loydcase - Wednesday, January 13, 2010 - link
Well, you have an interesting point. I should have probably kept her on XP until it was time to move to Win7. Maybe I should add that to my "lessons learned." ;-)ssj4Gogeta - Wednesday, January 13, 2010 - link
Or you could just have done a fresh Vista install.mackintire - Wednesday, January 13, 2010 - link
Because that machine eats a ton of electricity at idle and acts like a portable space heater.I ran away from that processor for almost the same reasons. Windows 7 would have been a much smarter choice, but I know better than to trust a upgrade install when the OS has been used for that long. Going over the machine with something like Revo uninstaller and removing everything un-necessary would have been a good idea too.
Spivonious - Wednesday, January 13, 2010 - link
I agree. My best system at home is an E6600 with an HD3850. It runs everything I throw at it and Win7 is smooth as butter.Some more thorough spyware scans would have been the proper solution.
jigglywiggly - Wednesday, January 13, 2010 - link
That system was great, infact almost better than my pc and it's blazing fast. Go put a cup of Debian or even Ubuntu if you want it to never get slow as hell. Hell even windows 7 runs fine on it.BTW I have a qx6700 oc'd at 3.6 ghz, I have no idea why you guys can't oc that qx6850 more. Mine is intel's first quadcore. Though it's a thermalright ultra 120x with 2 110cfm on it.
Calin - Wednesday, January 13, 2010 - link
Debian or Ubuntu is not compatible with all the software his daughter was using ("anything she might think she will like")Overclocking everything will make the system at most twice as fast. This is great when moving from 20 fps in a game to 40 fps, but it's no good when moving from an application start time of 40 seconds to an application start time of 20 seconds.
Even more, most of the performance problems I imagine it was having were related to frequent disk accesses, and overclocking will do nothing for this.
leexgx - Wednesday, January 13, 2010 - link
its the disk subsystem that takes the bashing under Vista some HDDs handle it well most do not (find Hitachi HDDs work well under High random access loads), disabling Superfetch can fix the issue at boot as superfetch does not care about I/O priorty under vista (that was fixed under win7), system restore not that i recommend to turn that off but that can help some timesleexgx - Wednesday, January 13, 2010 - link
the permanent fix is an SSD for Vista due to its heavy disk loads ultimately