Hoping you can help me out a bit..

[D3ads]

Sorry for this guys, but I don't have anyone to ask seeing as my contacts at my old workplace who I usually get me to help with things like this aren't back till Wednesday :S

Basically my CD-ROM and DVD-ROM have started being odd, let me try to explain. My CD-ROM will not spin up at all whilst in windows, if I however put it in the tray before I get to the windows log-on screen it will spin up and run fine, but if I take it out and put it back in again it wont. The funny thing is it reads all CDs no matter what type as blank CDs, so my games that use multiple CDs are unusable. What's really odd is that it will read re-writable CDs fine and I can drag and drop files onto a disc just as I have in the past. I can aslso burn CDs fine, I just can't view anything on them when I insert them again after the burn!!

The DVD drive is the same, although at least I can play DVD games as long as I put the DVD in the drive before I load the windows log-on screen.. confused yet?

One thing that worries me is that even though I have the CD set as first boot device in BIOS it still wont boot from a CD at all, it's as if there's just nothing in the drive. I tried formatting with the XP disc but it's not going anywhere because it just simply doesn't boot at all which is just bollocks!

I've so far tried disconnecting both drives to see what happens when they're not there and as per normal there are just no drives present and when I reconnect them the problems are still there.

The floppy disc drive also appears to be playing up, as it refuses to read any discs (I don't use it so I just disabled it in BIOS for now).

Soooo... any ideas what the Hell is up? I have no clues myself, I've never come across anything like this before.

Oh and I've ran spyware and virus scans thousands of times over and there is always nothing there.

Help?!!

FYI: I DID do a Google search but found nothing that was relevant, this is a most bizarre affliction!!!

[Fletch]

1) Remove your drivers and install new ones for both drivers

2) If that doesn't work, you might want to think a full reformat/reinstall because it might just Windows death thing.

3) If that doesn't work, it's probably hardware, so get a new drive.

[D3ads]

I've already changed the drivers actually, forgot to mention that...

That's just it though, I can't format because it doesn't recognise that there's even a CD to boot from in the drive!

I plan to get a new mobo and stuff next year sometime..

Thanks for the help.

[Spellbinder]

Try a Windows98 startdiscet to boot from and see if you can view the drives from there.

In that case you should be able to format and reinstall.

Unless you have NTFS and it refuse to format from dos.

Spellbinder.

[D3ads]

Try a Windows98 startdiscet to boot from and see if you can view the drives from there.

In that case you should be able to format and reinstall.

Unless you have NTFS and it refuse to format from dos.

Spellbinder.

Yes, I do have NTFS. Wont boot from a startup disc..

It's not so bad really, I've been playing F.E.A.R. perfectly fine, although obviously I need the problem fixed but for now I'm ok..

[Skjalg]

What you do, is boot up your pc with a windows 98 CD in it, (you said you had the CD-ROM as a first bootdevice). You'll get three options (i think), one is to install windows98 and another is to just boot up your pc with cd rom (the last is without cd rom).

Obviously, if you cant get this far because your cd-roms dont work when you boot up you probably got a hardware virus or your motherboard is sining on its last verse?_?

okay, when you've booted the pc with the 98, and chosen to start it up with just the cd-rom. Then put in your winxp cd, go into the i386 folder and type install (or setup, or win, dont remember). that'll start the xp installation. And it'll find your NTFS drives... Which means you can do a clean format and then install winxp again...

[D3ads]

Thanks, I'll try what you said

[D3ads]

Ok so it turned out it was the BIOS that needed flashing, which meant killing the machine off..

Good news is I've set the ball rolling for an upgrade

I wanted to go for a 3.8GHZ machine but I'm told that you need a 64bit version of XP, yet that is only in beta format, so my question is how the hell do you run these high-end machines?

With this in mind, I've had to stick with a backup plan, this is what I have so far:

Intel 3.2GHZ and new Gigabyte motherboard.

120GB HDD.

1024GB RAM.

GeForce 6600 GT

Any advice you can give me on achieving a decent setup? I'd like to be able to run say F.E.A.R. on the full settings if possible..

Also what are the benefits of going to a bigger monitor? I've had a 15 " screen for years and it only goes upto a 1024x768 resolution and I want to go higher possibly, but is it worth it and why?

Thanks in advance..

PS: I'd like answers to these ASAP please as I need to know by the end of today what I'm doing...

[Tequila]

Ok so it turned out it was the BIOS that needed flashing, which meant killing the machine off..

Good news is I've set the ball rolling for an upgrade

I wanted to go for a 3.8GHZ machine but I'm told that you need a 64bit version of XP, yet that is only in beta format, so my question is how the hell do you run these high-end machines?

With this in mind, I've had to stick with a backup plan, this is what I have so far:

Intel 3.2GHZ and new Gigabyte motherboard.

120GB HDD.

1024GB RAM.

GeForce 6600 GT

Any advice you can give me on achieving a decent setup? I'd like to be able to run say F.E.A.R. on the full settings if possible..

Also what are the benefits of going to a bigger monitor? I've had a 15 " screen for years and it only goes upto a 1024x768 resolution and I want to go higher possibly, but is it worth it and why?

Thanks in advance..

PS: I'd like answers to these ASAP please as I need to know by the end of today what I'm doing...

You heard wrong chief, the high-end 64-bit Athlons run 32-bit Windows and games just fine. When eventually stuff like Windows Vista comes out you'll be able to 'unlock' the 64-bit potential of your CPU.

[D3ads]

Ok I had a conversation with him again and what he says is that the high-end machines will run on a 32bit XP but they'll be slower than they should be, thus I'm better off running an Intel P4 3.2 machine, which should be just as fast as any of the 64bit chips...

So final system is:

Intel 3.2GHZ and new Gigabyte motherboard.

120GB HDD.

1024GB RAM.

GeForce 6600 GT

New DVD re-writer

[Thrik]

That system seems generally fine, although the video card may prove to be somewhat of a bottleneck. I got a 6600GT when HL2 came out, and although it was fine for that period it started to struggle soon after. That is, a lot of games which came out during 2005 have not ran particularly smoothly on the highest settings, including Battlefield 2, Black & White 2 and F.E.A.R. They will run, but thanks to the 6600GT only having 128mb of memory onboard in most cases, it seems to cause a slowdown when processing higher resolution textures and such.

So for example, you will be able to run BF2, but if you move to high textures it will start to stutter. This goes for pretty much all games at the moment. In short, it's not a very future-proof card at all and even for today's games you will have to turn settings down -- that is not what I'd personally look for when upgrading. It's basically a card at the end of its life.

If you can, get the 6800GT, which has an extra 128mb and generally runs games a hell of a lot more efficiently. The only thing much better than that is crossing into the Geforce 7 range, but they are for the most part extremely expensive right now and additionally require PCI-E as opposed to AGP.

Your processor is a bit better than mine and may be able to help, but I cannot see it being sufficient to balance out the 6600GT's inherent limits. I'm on an AMD Athlon XP 2800+ with 1GB of DDRAM and a Geforce 6600GT, for comparison.

[D3ads]

That system seems generally fine, although the video card may prove to be somewhat of a bottleneck. I got a 6600GT when HL2 came out, and although it was fine for that period it started to struggle soon after. That is, a lot of games which came out during 2005 have not ran particularly smoothly on the highest settings, including Battlefield 2, Black & White 2 and F.E.A.R. They will run, but thanks to the 6600GT only having 128mb of memory onboard in most cases, it seems to cause a slowdown when processing higher resolution textures and such.

So for example, you will be able to run BF2, but if you move to high textures it will start to stutter. This goes for pretty much all games at the moment. In short, it's not a very future-proof card at all and even for today's games you will have to turn settings down -- that is not what I'd personally look for when upgrading. It's basically a card at the end of its life.

If you can, get the 6800GT, which has an extra 128mb and generally runs games a hell of a lot more efficiently. The only thing much better than that is crossing into the Geforce 7 range, but they are for the most part extremely expensive right now and additionally require PCI-E as opposed to AGP.

Your processor is a bit better than mine and may be able to help, but I cannot see it being sufficient to balance out the 6600GT's inherent limits. I'm on an AMD Athlon XP 2800+ with 1GB of DDRAM and a Geforce 6600GT, for comparison.

Fuck, it's all ordered now so I can't change the video card, I was afraid something like this would happen.. I'm not going to be playing BF2 as it's not really my thing so I'm not going to run into any problems there..

On a somewhat offtopic note: Are the forum server problems fixed now or is just that work loads this fine like a few other people?

[Spellbinder]

On a somewhat offtopic note: Are the forum server problems fixed now or is just that work loads this fine like a few other people?

I'm sorry i would try to help if i knew what you just said

Clarify pls

Spellbinder.

[D3ads]

Doesn't matter

[D3ads]

Oh great so due to not being able to get me a 6600, they got me a 6200 instead

I can get F.E.A.R. running on near enough the high settings on a fairly low resolution with an average of 65fps

Quake 4 is odd, I run it on the low settings and I get an average 20fps, I run it on the high settings and I still get 20fps. I have the latest drivers and everything, double the ram, triple the cpu and yet it runs the same as it did on my 1.4 machine.. wtf?!!!