Returning to the fold

[PMC]

After about 18 months of almost exclusive WinAMD usage (except for sporadic use of UAE) my PC died in quite strange circumstances last week when it crashed during an XP reinstall and now stubbornly refuses to even display a BIOS menu.

So I therefore dug out my trusty old A1200 system and plugged it in, expecting a shower of sparks after the last time when the '040's chip fan detached itself...

It worked!  

I've deleted my Workbench partition and have reinstalled the OS from scratch.  After endless pfaffing with installign my Voodoo card (curses Elbox!) my Amiga is now running steady as a rock in glorious 16bit colour.

Wahoo!

[blobrana]

Cool,

(shame about the winuae machine though)

[PMC]

blobrana wrote:
Cool,

(shame about the winuae machine though)

Well the WinUAE machine suffered from relentless virus/spyware attacks, hassles with installing games and lack of end user knowledge (ie, I buggered it up!).

I'd love to have the PC's performance but with an OS (preferably Amiga) and web browser that are sufficiently niche to avoid the unwanted attentions of the malware fraternity.  

[Speelgoedmannetje]

PMC wrote:
After about 18 months of almost exclusive WinAMD usage (except for sporadic use of UAE) my PC died in quite strange circumstances last week when it crashed during an XP reinstall and now stubbornly refuses to even display a BIOS menu.

Was it an ATI videocard?

[odin]

I used to use an NVidia GF4MX440, then I switched to a Radeon 9200 and the PC went from rocksteady to the proverbial instable windoze {bleep}box....

[PMC]

@Speel

Yes it is an ATI card....?

[Speelgoedmannetje]

I got some strange problems with a windows driver, and then I restarted the computer, and it wouldn't display the bios and so. Something was wrong with displaying ASCII.

As soon as I have enough money, I'll buy the cheapest NVidia videocard. I've had nothing but troubles with modern ATI videocards (old ones, like mach64, were always good though)
And yes, I tried every old and new driver, including the omega driver.

[fillosauru]

About the video cards; In the past 5 yrs I used a lot of them, but i'll stick to the ones in my most modern machines:
P III 450 Mhz, ALI chipset mobo, nVidia RIVA 128 4 Mb, PCI:
no problems, only the TV output a little fuzzy
same machine, ATI RAGE 128, 16 Mb, AGP 2x: no problems at all
same, nVidia TNT2, 32 Mb, AGP 2x: no problems, even when I overclocked the video card;
Celeron 600 (well, it mostly worked at 900), Gigabyte VIA mobo, TNT2: no problems
same, xcept for the mobo (ASUS VIA mobo): no problems
Celeron 1200 Mhz, MSI Intel mobo, ATI RADEON 9250, 128 Mb: small glitches in games, corrected when I installed the latest drivers; it even worked with DOS games that required VESA compatibility, unlike the RIVA 128, wich did not;
In 7 months I had no other troubles with my RADEON, and I used Windoze 98SE, XP, and several Linuxes; also, good quality of TV output, either composite or S-Video
And now I'll switch sides again, 'cause I want to get me a GeForce 6200

[paulvm]

well its no the video card, from what he said i beleive he has a pc virus that infected the bios. to make sure this is not the problem open the case reseat the card. also what bios is installed and what beeps do you hear. If is the bios you either have to buy a new mb or a new bios chip. that my best guess without seeing the pc. or more info a pc tech support guy. also next time put on pc antivirus software, adware blockers and a firewall. runing registry repir software will also help. only defrage your hd 1 every 1 to 3 months.

[PMC]

Thanks guys, I did remove the card for a while with no success.  I guess it's a new Mobo then....

[paulvm]

just because the mb might be dead the cpu and ram is good just look for another mb that meet your cpu specs. your boot hd has to be reformatted to get destory the virus you could use it as a second drive but make sure you have antivirus on the first drive to scan it first. most computers die because of power problems not viruses. mainly voltage spikes and drops. so also get a ups system.