Nf7-s2g

[Halo]

I recently swapped a buggy ASUS A7V333 with a spare new Abit NF7-S2G board, I had bought extra over a year ago. It's paired with a 512mb stick of Kingston RAM. The Asus was freezing when I played video and audio. Weird thing is now I am having the same problem with the new board. I switched hard drives to test that. It's fine. Reformatted, reinstalled everything. It worked fine until I downloaded new Nforce drivers from NVIDIA site and Nforce Audio driver. Once I downloaded Flashplayer 9 I started noticing the problem. Now, it freezes midstream in Winamp. I tried reversing the drivers back to what came with the board. However, I am bothered that this is the same kind of problem the other board was giving me except it froze whenever I did anything, unplugged a USB, opened too many windows et cetera, et cetera. I am leaning toward the idea I have bad memory or worse yet the proc is jacked. I am really so close to giving up on PCs. I am tired of this bull**it. Anyone have an idea what's bugging my sys? Let me know. I have been waiting to hear from someone at Abit for weeks. Pretty much why I only buy ASUS now. No more Abit EVER!!! :eww

[Halo]

... well, last of my experiments brought me to the CPU. Thank god for spare parts and thank god for ASUS, ABIT and AMD for building products that are so tolerable of spare parts. I had some slower mem and ruled out the mem, swapped another hard drive in installed Nforce drivers on the fly and presto it worked, pulled every card, adjusted every jumper swapped power supplies, diiscon'd all peripherals... down to the bone.

I went to Benchmark HQ and downloaded CPU Stability Test which performed a heat ramp on my CPU and then the system promptly shut down. It did this 3 times. Then I ran the NV System Utility and began to run apps, and what do you know,my CPU temp ramped up out of control and then prompted the panic shutdown on my MOBO. So, thank god I had a spare 1800+ proc in storage that was left over from a system FEDEX managed to destroy in shipment, and low and behold I am going on 3 hours now of running music, video, 10 IE windows and Trend Micro PC-cillin, and thanks to my aluminum block Spire heatsink my proc is running flat out at a chilly 35'C. Brilliant.

I do wish troubleshooting PC was not such a time-consuming event. I just keep thinking if I was John Q. Citizen on the street, all my problems with this POS would have cost me so much money for a tech to analyze, would've probably cost me my data, and would've inconvenienced me with a lot more down time than it did. Here's to knowing enough to be dangerous.
Props to IOMAN for teaching me what I know. :cheers

[Ioman]

haha thanks for the props. So it turned out to be the CPU? Is everything running ok now?