Not that you should give a rat’s tuchus about my personal PC Meltdown Hell, but the local PC store that put the system together thinks it’s isolated the problem. They’ve managed to get XP loaded onto the new 120Gb hard drive, but only by taking out one of the system’s two memory 512Mb chips. The memory chips test as good, but if both are in at the same time, they get the same random hard drive writing errors that kept me up until 3 last night. They’re going to try updating the board’s BIOS to see if it fixes what looks like an incompatibility between the dual channel mobo and the RAM. (Or is it the RAM that’s dual channel?)

FWIW, it’s an ASUS P4P800 Delux motherboard with two Kingston HyperX 512Mb memory chips.

Update: The BIOS update seems to have done the trick, but the store’s going to keep the machine until Monday morning to see if it makes it through the weekend.

Thanks for all the great discussion on the comment board.

Categories: Uncategorized dw