The confusion hits!

How big is your power supply?

As for the RAM, I'm surprised nobody would sell it where you are. Newegg can do decently on a matched pair with overnight shipping. If your power supply is 500-ish watts or more, then you'll want to look at placing that order. If you're under 500W, you need to upgrade your power supply. AMD processors are hogs (especially with the FSB working that fast) and a graphics card like that has its own demands. Nothing else should be a major power drain, unless it's all going at once.

Good luck getting this all fixed, I don't know what I'd do if one of my computers started going out on me - was a hard few months when me and my wife couldn't play EQ2 together.
 
The power supply is 500w. I made sure it would be enough after the first power supply blew up. Yes, blew up. Was an MSI product. My second one..luckily, it doesn't seem YET that it directly effected everything.

As for the RAM.. Yeah, it seemed strange to me. Is it really that outdated already? Either way, Newegg and Tiger Direct both had some good deals on it, but my parents ordered without me around and don't trust those sorts of sites since they believe those sites sell defective products now because of all my problems. So! Circuit City is sending the RAM and it should be here by Wednesday, much too late.. It HAS to fix the problem or I'll be dead.

I really like a line Tyrson said yesterday concerning my computer.. Think it describes it wonderfully. "That computer has been through more power surges than any machine should have to go through..."

And I think my computer's "butt" is located on the front, side, and back. It's a hard target to miss, Ainilome!
 
Update! Computer up and running with nothing strange except some sort of fan being at a low speed. However, this is probably caused by some sort of plug being switched around as they are all at least running. Thank you everyone who helped!
 
Update, or downdate, still have a graphics driver problem! What is happening (and I seem to be bad at explaining all this)

Twitchiness in most games. (rapidly zooming in and out, going through random parts of an animation, etc.)

Light effects being put on pause if I turn to see them fast enough. Light effects moving at a slower speed than the object(there by duplicating themselves. Good in WoW battlegrounds, but I'd rather do without).

Sometimes being temporarily fixed by reinstalling drivers and restarting the computer.
 
I forget what it is called, but there are driver cleaners out there. Get the program to clean your video card driver out and start fresh that way. But it might actually be a problem with the card itself. Either way, sorry to hear it.
 
Got a new one, 8800GTS. Wasn't the card. So, today got a new hard drive too since I started getting blue screens after trying to reformat and such. Can anyone help with reformatting? I know how to do it. I got the, apparently messed up, hard drive reformatted and everything. However, with this new one I can't get any of our windows disks to read. It simply says at that point of installation that "Setup could not read the disk". Both of the disks are valid Windows XP disks, but neither are reading. I've had this problem before.

So..Brand new hard drive! Anyone know what could be preventing the computer from reading these disks?

Edit: Ack! My name changed!
 
(Pardon if I'm stating the obvious, I always try to explain stuff so that most anyone can understand it, even without supreme knowledge of computers.)

Pinn, do you know how your hard drives connected? Serial ATA cables? Or old-fashioned IDE wire-ribbons?

Actually, even diregarding that, do you know how to check your bios boot settings? For most computers, when they first start up you get one of two screens:

1) A black screen with white textual data, just a basic boot screen.
2) Some computers are set to display a logo like Dell, Windows, whatever, on top of the basic boot screen.

In either case, there should somewhere be a message that says "Press [Key] to enter Setup", or something similar. If it doesn't list a button, try the following over and over, rebooting as necesarry for each new button attempt: F1, F3, F5, F8, F10-12, and Delete.

Pressing the proper button takes you to your system BIOS, which is the "operating system" built into your motherboard. It is essentially a loading program, which is what loads up your main OS, like Windows, from a CD or hard drive.

Somewhere in your bios is a Boot section. Here you can tell it which drives to boot from first and whatnot. Try swapping the order of your drives in boot.

If that doesn't work, it may be based on your cable connections, as I mentioned at the beginning of the post. Try swapping which cable connects which hard drive to which port on the motherboard. I run two SATA hard drives, and whenever I disconnect them and move them, I try to put them back right, but always connect them backwards. So I just switch the cables and it can boot properly. (Note: Switch only where the cables lead to, not where they come off of the hard drive. Can drive you batty otherwise.)

~Dune Walker~
 
Yep, figured out the problem and it was once again a stupid thing. All the discs in my house were "upgrade" discs...So, I'm now on Vista. Vista basic and Windows Home full versions both cost the same, so....
 
This might be a bit late in coming but... The neat thing about upgrade disks is they don't require an installed previous version- just a disk of a previous version. So when I needed to completely reformat and reinstall a few months ago, I did what any upstanding person would do... I first downloaded an image of a Win 98 cd... in german (it was the first torrent finished), burned a cd and the XP installation was satisfied.
 
Vista is just Widow's beta for their next OS, whatever they happen to call that. All of it is buggy so I am sticking with my XP. Too bad I bought the OEM version before I really knew about OEM software. Oh well.
 
I installed Vista Ultimate a year ago, in October, when MS released it to Developers. The OS has come a looong way since then. Most of the problems stemmed from Driver and Program compatibility issues. Most companies didn't have Vista drivers ready, then.

Cisco VPN, OpenVPN, Razor mice, SoundBlaster, Visual Studio 2005, the list goes on.. I reverted my gaming PC back to XP Pro almost immediately. I've managed to stick with Vista, though, on one of my Dev PCs. Things are much improved these day... Though IIS7 is still a PITA.

This is a good time for gamers to adopt Vista, especially with new games emerging which finally take advantage of DirectX 10 capabilities. PC Gamer has a good article, this month, about Vista and they show some interesting DX9 vs. DX10 comparisons. If you can easily afford the DX10 Video card and Vista, it is worth the upgrade hassle. :smiley:
 
HJ-Navarre said:
I installed Vista Ultimate a year ago, in October, when MS released it to Developers. The OS has come a looong way since then. Most of the problems stemmed from Driver and Program compatibility issues. Most companies didn't have Vista drivers ready, then.

Cisco VPN, OpenVPN, Razor mice, SoundBlaster, Visual Studio 2005, the list goes on.. I reverted my gaming PC back to XP Pro almost immediately. I've managed to stick with Vista, though, on one of my Dev PCs. Things are much improved these day... Though IIS7 is still a PITA.

This is a good time for gamers to adopt Vista, especially with new games emerging which finally take advantage of DirectX 10 capabilities. PC Gamer has a good article, this month, about Vista and they show some interesting DX9 vs. DX10 comparisons. If you can easily afford the DX10 Video card and Vista, it is worth the upgrade hassle. :smiley:
Click to expand...
If you think it is worth it, I might as well. My XP is OEM, so I think I am SOL now that I upgraded pretty much all my hardware.
 
Don't know what it stands for, but the software becomes 'married' to that hard drive. I want the OS on the new drive since it is faster, so I need a full version, not OEM.
 
OEM stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer, and generally means that you get the Product directly from the Factory. If you buy something in a Store, it went from the Factory first to someone who packaged it, and is then called Retail. OEM just means that you don't get a Box, Manual or some Accessories.

In the Case of Vista, which needs to be activated and can only be activated a few times, I guess that it also means that you have it preinstalled and activated for the System.
 
Warning about Vista! With graphics intensive things, if you have Vista and use nVidia, then there is a common bug going around where the nvlddmkm.sys driver will stop responding. There is not a definite fix for this problem as of yet. I'm still trying to find a way to fix this with no luck..been looking for days.
 

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