PC help request

[msu1878]

I have been fighting with my son's computer for several weeks now. His hardware consists of:
FIC AZ11EA motherboard
Athlon 1 GHz processor
1 gig pc 133 ram (2x 512 Kingston)
20-gig Maxtor primary drive
40-gig IBM secondary drive
52x MSI dragon writer CDRW
Creative Live 5.1 soundcard
350-watt power supply
Windows XP Pro

I've reinstalled windows twice in the last month.

I built the systems about 18 months ago and he has only had few problems with with it. About 2 months ago he started to have a few problems with installing software or running existing software, so we reinstalled XP That is when major problems began. If you are trying to installing software or games, you will sometimes get a message of cab files not being correct or worse, most of the time it will just reboot during the installation and it is a major hastle getting the windows to run after it does this. I've had it reboot while trying to install just about any kind of software you can think of, Norton, games, Creative, etc. Any ideas what piece(s) of hardware could be the problem. (BTW the power supply is about 5 months old and does not seem to be the problem).

[XShadowZxX]

Could be the vid card for the games. Whats the video card in that machine ?

[meese]

Could be memory related. Try it with only one memory stick, if it still fails try the other one by itself.

[msu1878]

It has a Gforce 3 ti card and it seems to work well.

The computer will reboot while installing just about any kind of software, not just games or it will error and say the cab file is incorrect (something like that). I've tried the same software on my computer with no problem. I've never seen a computer just reboot during software installation. I will try the memory first.

[DoctorReno]

I'd look at memory also. Have you tried running a memory diagnostic utility on the memory?
How old is the CD drive?

On another note.. what are the speeds of the 2 HD's?

[msu1878]

The hard drives are both 7200 rpm's, the CDRW is about 6 months old. I have not run any memory utilites, what would you suggest?

[DoctorReno]

Probably the two best memory testing utilities are free downloads at:
http://www.memtest86.com/
http://www.simmtester.com/PAGE/products/doc/docinfo.asp

[msu1878]

with one of the utilities and it did not find any errors, what would you check next? I have not taken out a stick of the memory yet, just ran the utility.

[sKiT]

Windows XP installed just fine with no errors? But no other programs will install correctly? I would be looking at your CD-ROM\CDR-RW and or Windows XP CD. I have seen 2 bad Win XP CD's and still own one funky CD-ROM that works sometimes but, often inflicts file read errors of all types when I put a CD in its tray.

[msu1878]

I am running another memory test (it sure takes a long time) and and going to install another cd drive that I have and will try it out later. It still is really strange how the computer just shuts down (powers off) during installations and reboots.


Thanks for all the suggestions, so far!