A7V Problems!

[mans]

I am facing three problems with my A7V motherboard:

1) Bad HD performance: when testing my Westerndigital 13GB ATA66 using SiSoft Sandra Millennium, it shows performance comparable to UDMA/33 harddrives. I've installed latest VIA 4in1 drivers (ver 4.25a), enabled HD DMA, and selected network server in HD cash option. I run the test from Win98 and Win2K and still the same bad marks. Is it the HD itself or there is something else I can do to boost performance.

2) Hangs: another difficulty I have is with PS/2 mouse port. Sometimes, the system freezes once I move the mouse or click on a button. I reconnected the mouse into serial port using the appropriate adapter and the machine went stable as a rock. It is Genius mouse model NetScroll+. Again, is it the mouse or the motherboard which causes this?

3) Endless memory test: when I turn off the fast boot option from setup program, the memory test goes to infinity! I mean when the system boots and reaches memory test, the system falls into an infinite loop and dose not exit until Esc key is pressed. When the system finishes testing the last byte, it goes back aging to byte zero and start looping from there. No error message is displayed.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

-----------
AMD T-bird 950@950.
A7V motherboard rev. 1.01
BIOS ver 1.004
Asus 7700 Pure AGP
128MB PC133 memory
250W power supply

 

[mans]

About the PS/2 port, I think I was mistaken! The system hanged few minutes ago! The mouse has been connected to the serial port for two days with no hangs so I thought the problem was with PS/2 port.

I start thinking of power supply as source of these hangs. Any comments please?

 

[rmblam]

A crappy power supply will cause a hard reboot before a hang I would think.

I myself have not had good luck with stability and the 1004a or c bios. Every time I flash back to the 1003 my problems go away. Remember to reset to defaults, f-10 and exit the reboot and reset all your bios. Try clearing the ESCD once and see if it clears it up. Try moving your memory to another slot.

Make sure the mouse drivers are kosher. Is mouse.vxd present or is it in (mouse.vxd) after some vmm driver name? If so then it is missing. You'll have to extract the file from your windows install disk if not. Save it to system and vmm32 folders and reboot. Check all your drivers actually. Windows likes to "forget" a few. They are in cabs 53 and 54 for w98 and cabs 20 for Wme I think. Make sure there are no IRQ conflicts with your mouse. Modems like to create a conflict with mice.

Hard drive. Are you using an old cable or the wrong cable? (80 pin)? Did you defrag? Anythihng else on the cable with it? Zip drives and other devices may drag it down.

 

[bchillin]

Yo, Welcome to the club...

The freezing is not your mouse. There are a bunch of us having the random freezes; often while on the net but not always. I spent days thinking it was keyboard/mouse etc.

There are several "approaches" which have helped.

The thing that fixed my crashing was setting "System Performance Settings" to Normal, in BIOS. The downside to this is you apparently lose some performance (limits AGP to 2X). I am hoping a future bios upgrade fixes the problem the correct way.

Others are going back to bios 1.003 but I here it is not good for Win2K.

Check out these sites:
http://members.tripod.de/Juggernaut/ts_crashes/index.htm
http://pub26.ezboard.com/fjuggernautshardwarefrm1

 

[mans]

Thank you for your help?

I prefer to keep 1003 BIOS as the last solution. I have cleaned ESCD many times. I will try to move the memory chip to a different slot and see. I am sure about the mouse driver. For HD, yes I?m using 80-cable and BIOS recognize it as ATA66 drive. It is the only drive connected to primary IDE port.

Yes, all hangs are while on the net. For AGP 4x, I have heard a lot about its compatibility with VIA chipset. I will try to make system performance to normal and see the result. BTW, MS System Information program shows conflicts over IRQ9 between the VGA card, USB ports, and MS ACPI-Compliant System. I tried to solve this conflict from Win2K Device Manager but the program sees no conflict and prevented me from changing IRQ settings of these devices. So, I disabled USB ports as nothing is connected to them currently. I do not about this ACPI.

 

[bchillin]

Does MS actually show conflicts or just sharing? ACPI normally shares all your cards and other devices on IRQ 9 or 11. This is by design.

I have ACPI turned off so I could control the IRQ settings in BIOS. Here is how you turn it off:

How to Troubleshoot Windows 2000 Hardware Abstraction Layer Issues

 

[hungrypete]

what sound card are you running? Aureal soundcards in a kx133 or kt133 cause some of your symptoms. Also, any power supply below 250w might cause some of your symptoms, and sometimes an overloaded 250w will also do this. What brand of RAM are you using? Some generic RAM just won't run in a KX or KT133 board. You seem to be having far more problems than the average A7V user, my A7V only has a few insignificant quirks. Sorry I couldnt be more helpful and good luck.

 

[rmblam]

Another recommendation regarding the hard drive is to use windows IDE bus master drivers (better performance). Go into device manager and update the drivers for the bus master and point it at your windows installation disk. Either try that or use the 4in1 installation to unistall the via bus master driver. (probably better)

 

[mans]

Thank you again for your help.

I have no sound card installed in my system. I have ordered SB Live! Value and it is in its way to me. I use IBM PC133 128MB SDRAM. I have gone through many other problems with A7V! The three mentioned here are just the one I could not solve. I am even thinking of creating a web page to explain those problems and how I could solve them! Was it a wise idea to build an AMD-based machine?!

 

[mans]

Thank you all for your help. I switched the system performance to normal and disabled byte merge in BIOS. I run two days now without a single glitch! Although I got lower performance in Sandra but it is ok. I am still having problem with HD performance (it is connected to the ordinary primary IDE port) and memory test.

Thanks.

 

[KinderEgg]

about the memory test......i guess you have enabled the "quick...self test"(i don't remember what it is called) in BIOS?

 

[NicColt]

mans, what do you mean you disabled the byte merge in bios, what does that do anyway.