Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Columbus, Ohio USA
Posts: 255

Ok, here's the deal. I'm putting together a little computer for a friend of mine and I'm having some difficulties.

I usually stick with AMD, but I decided to get him a Celeron because of the better 3D and I know that's all he's going to do with it anyway is play games.

So I have some mb that suits celerons, eurocom or something, 64 Megs of PC100 memory, 6.4 gig WD HDD, floppy, CDRom, 3dfx velocity 100, and trying to install win95B.

First I had some problems with it not booting up right, but I think that had to do with the ide cable. Seems fine after that. Then I get windows loaded finally, but when I try to install video drivers I got some fault and I had to reboot. Set those up, opened up windows explorer and a fault, had to reboot. Try to install Unreal, lockup halfway through the installation.. got it installed, protection fault every time I try to run the game.

Now I try to reinstall windows and I keep getting errors during the installation (reformatted the HDD btw).. something like SUWIN error.. to that extent.

Now, I'm running a celeron 366 at the autodetect bus and voltage.. it's coming up as 366 so I think it's ok. Is the PC100 memory the problem? Should I not have gotten memory that fast? I'm losing my mind because I don't know why this thing is so unstable.

If anyone could help me I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks
-b

Am I doing something wrong

Registered: Oct 1999
Location:
Posts: 18

Ok. What is your mother board? Did you try the mem in different slots? The speed is ok (unless in BIOS it is set to 100Mhz bus speed instead of 66), I have a 300A that works fine with PC100 (even CAS2).

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Columbus, Ohio USA
Posts: 255

MB.. I don't think it really has jumpers on it, more of an autodetect thing. At any rate, it reads the CPU at 366 so I'm thinking that's fine.

Someone on another board said that it might be reading the voltage wrong and that could be causing some problems, so I might have to try that. I will put on Windows 98 and see if that does any better, though the lockups have happened in DOS too so I don't know what to do.

And I also have run the memory in both slots that it has and one seems a little better over the other, but that's just for booting up. Oh well, I'll crack at it later after work, again. So much for helping friends out for free

Registered: Sep 1999
Location: Texan in Calgary for a while
Posts: 1361

Goto http://technet.microsoft.com/cdonline/default.asp and do a search on suwin. There are several KB articles on that file.

------------------
James Hromadka
VisorCentral.com
Personal Website: http://www.Hromadka.com

Registered: Sep 1999
Location:
Posts: 95

Check to be sure you didn't do something stupid like I did when I added the CD-RW to my machine recently.

Everything seemed to work fine for the quick, power it on and see if everything is detected OK test, but the system got INCREDIBLY flakey afterwards. I got hard drive access time-out errors in Linux, and Windows actually STOPPED BOOTING altogether.

I took one last look at the system before breaking down and taking it to a tech shop, when I noticed that I had the power cables strung as follows:
230W Power Supply -> Case Fan -> CPU Fan -> Floppy Drive -> Hard Drive -> CD-RW Drive

The poor things just weren't getting enough juice and were spinning down at random intervals. Totally trashed both operating systems, and had to completely reinstall both from scratch.

I've decided my next machine will have at least one 300W power supply (maybe two).

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Columbus, Ohio USA
Posts: 255

Thanks for the link James.. some pretty good articles there that I'll have to try out.

I don't know of anything I'd have in my case that would be sucking up a lot of juice (I believe it's 250W). FDD, HDD, MB, CDROM, and a tiny fan in front. Maybe I'll get rid of that.

I'm starting to think it's a problem with my video card being AGP. The MB probably is so crappy that it doesn't know what to do with it, so any extra juice isn't getting to the card the right way and it's bombing out. The disk that came with the MB kinda sucks and half the time I try to get to the drivers it crashes anyway.

Registered: Nov 1999
Location:
Posts: 70

It's the AGP, I can tell you right now. But it's not the MB's fault, its your OS.

I built a kick-____ machine for myself and the OS was backordered so I slapped an old copy of 95B on it while I was waiting... 95B fools itself into beleiving the AGP card is simply PCI and it royally confuses itself. Upgrading to 98 will fix this problem. I was stuck in 16-colors for the longest time. I was able to bump the resolution and color table up to what the card could support, but then Windows threw a fit and I had to boot into safe mode to remove the error that would otherwise appear.

I was disappointed, but everything came out fine w/ 98. (BTW, I dual-boot with linux and it has NO problem w/ AGP whatsoever... RH5.1 and above, that is) The DirectX and OpenGL performance on Win95B when using an AGP card (if you can get it to work) *seriously* suffers. 98 w/ DirectX 6 works wonderfully.

If it's any difference, my AGP card is a Creative Labs GraphicsBlaster RivaTNT w/ 16MB SDRAM, so it's not just 3Dfx cards either. I hope this relieves some of your stress.

__________
William