DarkUnderlord
Water Chip? Been There, Done That
Background:
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A few months ago now, my motherboard died. All that happened is my computer just died. It was working one minute, then all of a sudden the screen went blank and I was left with a little orange hard-drive light on. The thing's a year old and is nothing flash (Duron 850, 256 mb RAM, 20 gig HDD, Win 98). Anyway, I took it down to the shop and after an hour mucking around, trying out various things looking for the problem, the guy at the computer shop sold and installed a new motherboard for me, an MS-6378 (My old one used to be an MS-6340, I think). Took it home, worked fine... However, ever since then, I've been having little issues with it.
For example, after some time I found out that the in-built 3D graphics card in the old one was an S4 Savage3 with 32 meg of vieo ram shared with the computer. Nothing flash, it just did the job. However, the new in-built one was some cheap thing with a max of 8 meg of RAM shared with the comp. As a cheap cop-out (for a cheap card in the first place), I bought a Pine TNT2 (PCI slot, nothing flash). Now Need for Speed: High Stakes doesn't work. Anyway, that's the story, as the rest of this has happened since then.
CD-ROM Drive DMA:
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If you look in...
Control Panel --> System --> Device Manager --> CD-ROM --> (CD-ROM Drive) --> Properties --> Settings
.. there's a little DMA tick box sitting there. What is it and what does it do? I used to have it ticked, only for some reason, my CD-ROM drive started playing up. Autoplay wasn't working and any game that used the CD-ROM drive took a while to kick in (with some games even freezing up for exactly 15 seconds whenever trying to access the CD-ROM). At first I thought I'd turned autoplay off somehow and that was the problem... So I spent a while trying to remember just how exactly you turned autoplay off and on again (With no thanks to the help files here)... To cut a long story short (and with a little help from Quake because it froze for 15 secs upon loading as it showed the words "DMA Channel"), I eventually unticked the DMA tick box, restarted my computer and all my problems were solved. Why?
The fact that it works is great. The fact that I don't know WHY it worked, is somewhat annoying. Anyone have any clues?
MS-DOS:
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Now, for some reason, I can't restart in MS-DOS mode. All I get is a blank screen after windows (Win 98) shutsdown. I'm figuring I might need to format and start again (about time I did that anyway I think, especially after changing motherboards). Any special reason that anyone can think off as to why this might be happening though?
The computer used to be great, it did what I wanted and I never had ANY issues with it AT ALL. Now, ever since the motherboard change-over, I've had nothing BUT issues. I realise it's an old comp and is nothing flash (I thought about throwing in the towel when the motherboard died in the first place and getting a new comp, but was hopeful a new motherboard would be fine), but it would be nice if I could get the thing to work properly. I don't plan on buying a new comp until mid-way through next year.
[link:users.senet.com.au/~dbschah/|DarkUnderlord]
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http://darkunderlord.freeyellow.com/images/signature_cow.gif
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Moo..... Moo.... I'm an Interplay Cow. (Ready to be milked with a Fallout style MMORPG with aliens!)
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A few months ago now, my motherboard died. All that happened is my computer just died. It was working one minute, then all of a sudden the screen went blank and I was left with a little orange hard-drive light on. The thing's a year old and is nothing flash (Duron 850, 256 mb RAM, 20 gig HDD, Win 98). Anyway, I took it down to the shop and after an hour mucking around, trying out various things looking for the problem, the guy at the computer shop sold and installed a new motherboard for me, an MS-6378 (My old one used to be an MS-6340, I think). Took it home, worked fine... However, ever since then, I've been having little issues with it.
For example, after some time I found out that the in-built 3D graphics card in the old one was an S4 Savage3 with 32 meg of vieo ram shared with the computer. Nothing flash, it just did the job. However, the new in-built one was some cheap thing with a max of 8 meg of RAM shared with the comp. As a cheap cop-out (for a cheap card in the first place), I bought a Pine TNT2 (PCI slot, nothing flash). Now Need for Speed: High Stakes doesn't work. Anyway, that's the story, as the rest of this has happened since then.
CD-ROM Drive DMA:
-----------------
If you look in...
Control Panel --> System --> Device Manager --> CD-ROM --> (CD-ROM Drive) --> Properties --> Settings
.. there's a little DMA tick box sitting there. What is it and what does it do? I used to have it ticked, only for some reason, my CD-ROM drive started playing up. Autoplay wasn't working and any game that used the CD-ROM drive took a while to kick in (with some games even freezing up for exactly 15 seconds whenever trying to access the CD-ROM). At first I thought I'd turned autoplay off somehow and that was the problem... So I spent a while trying to remember just how exactly you turned autoplay off and on again (With no thanks to the help files here)... To cut a long story short (and with a little help from Quake because it froze for 15 secs upon loading as it showed the words "DMA Channel"), I eventually unticked the DMA tick box, restarted my computer and all my problems were solved. Why?
The fact that it works is great. The fact that I don't know WHY it worked, is somewhat annoying. Anyone have any clues?
MS-DOS:
-------
Now, for some reason, I can't restart in MS-DOS mode. All I get is a blank screen after windows (Win 98) shutsdown. I'm figuring I might need to format and start again (about time I did that anyway I think, especially after changing motherboards). Any special reason that anyone can think off as to why this might be happening though?
The computer used to be great, it did what I wanted and I never had ANY issues with it AT ALL. Now, ever since the motherboard change-over, I've had nothing BUT issues. I realise it's an old comp and is nothing flash (I thought about throwing in the towel when the motherboard died in the first place and getting a new comp, but was hopeful a new motherboard would be fine), but it would be nice if I could get the thing to work properly. I don't plan on buying a new comp until mid-way through next year.
[link:users.senet.com.au/~dbschah/|DarkUnderlord]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://darkunderlord.freeyellow.com/images/signature_cow.gif
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Moo..... Moo.... I'm an Interplay Cow. (Ready to be milked with a Fallout style MMORPG with aliens!)
*cough* And yar... Reading the manual is what I've been doing. Under Integrated Peripherals is the option I played with, which made Briosafreak live up to the last part of his name. 
