Boot up and shut down issues, Please help.

[Mithosphere]

Not to take the attention away from Lead Head, but my computer is quite insane, i dont trust it to shut it down or restart. At times i will have to restart due to updates, but it wont fully restart, sometimes i gets stuck on the Windows loading screen, sometimes it just freezes at the windows shutting down screen, and yet other it freezes during startup and loading the desktop. Its quite puzzling to me.

[gvblake22]

How long has it been since you've reformatted and reinstalled windows? I can only imagine the amount of stuff you download in a day!

Can you back up your important data (maybe to that garage sale special) and reformat/reinstall Windows? I'll bet that would solve all of your issues :thup:

[RangerXLT8]

Sounds like a dying PSU.

[Mithosphere]

Well i sure hope its not the psu, cause it would be kind of a bite to remove, let alone replace, although then i could atleast clean off dust and stuff.


thats the psu on the side, i have no idea why its there, i think it restricts airflow in my case, that and it gets in the way when installing ram or doing anything with the cpu


How long does windows take to install everything? and do i need to remove and video cards or wireless cards before reinstalling windows?

[gvblake22]

aahhh, you must have mATX system since it is all jammed in there so tightly.

Regardless, reformatting your HDD and reinstalling Windows is the same for any desktop computer (or even laptop for that matter). You can leave your video card in there, but you may actually want to take your wireless card out so you can re-install it when Windows is fully functional (at least that's what I like to do).

The time it takes to reformat your HDD will depend on the speed and capacity of the drive. I'm assuming you will be installing this on your 80GB drive and that it is 7200rpm. It will probably take about 20 minutes to format the drive, and another 10-20 minutes to install Windows. Once Windows is installed, your first step should be to install the chipset drivers for your motherboard. Check on the Asus website (the manufacturer of your motherboard) to see if they still have downloads available for that model; but a quick google search seems to indicate you are the only person in the world with that motherboard.
SO, you either misidentified your motherboard model, or it is so exclusive and undocumented or old that drivers aren't available that easily. Try checking on the Sony website or contacting a support person there to track down some chipset drivers.
It might be a good idea to make sure you can find the drivers first before you go and reformat/reinstall and find you have no drivers :thup:
If/when you manage to find some chipset drivers, then you just download the latest Catalyst Control Center 6.9 driver and .NET framework from ATI's website. This is the display driver for your 9600. Once you install the .NET framework then install the ATI display drivers, you can shut down, install your wireless card, then boot up and finalize that installation with either the driver disk that came with the card or by letting Windows automatically install it, whichever the card's manual suggests (if you have it).

Once all that is said and done, you should be good to go. From there you can finish installing all your programs and restoring your data that you (hopefully) backed up.

[Mithosphere]

well that doesnt sound too difficult . . . my only problem is that i have 40 gb of music to backup, is there some way i can do that without tranfering it over to my external drive? keep in mind im using usb 1.1 or something like that its slow either way. And yes that is the correct motherboard whoochamajink, i have checked several times and no luck on anything with that specific model of sony, its just way too old.

[gvblake22]

Did your system come with any disks that might indicate they contain system drivers or something like that?

As for backing up your data, there isn't really any good way to go about it. I say just start it up before you go to bed and let it run overnight...

[One4yu2c]

Originally Posted by gvblake22

It will probably take about 20 minutes to format the drive...

And on side note, if you're fairly certain the drive is in good health, you can cut back on the installation time by doing a 'Quick Format.' The only difference between a quick and regular format is the regular format scans for bad sectors. The larger the hard drive, the longer this process takes.

[Capper]

As far as music goes, burn them as mp3's to a CD/DVD.

[gvblake22]

Originally Posted by Capper

As far as music goes, burn them as mp3's to a CD/DVD.

yeah, but 40GB of music will take A LOT of DVD's (making it an expensive endeavor) and an ungodly number of CD's. For simple backup so oyu can reformat your drive, moving them to your external HDD would be fine. But if you want to actually archive them as a permanent backup for disaster recovery, then DVD's would work.