Weird Problem........

[jimmyca69]

Hi guys,

Wonder if you can help me with this one. I have come up to my girlfriends parents house and they are having strange problem with the pc i built for them before christmas.

On kazaa, word and even some web pages the texts on parts have gone microscopic. By that i mean they appear shrunk to size 1!! Other parts of the web page/document etx are fine - just some text. For example the search field in kazaa is unreadable but the rest of kazaa is fine. Also some text appears as though it is cut in half.

any ideas? The pc is running win 98se, with built in graphics on the mobo which i believe is a msi k76sa, something else which is weird is that the "gamma" tab that is usually availiable when you go to display properties, settings, advanced - appears and then disappears and when it is there i get an error message when clicking on it.

any ideas?

[jimmyca69]

actually its a MSI MS6378 mobo. I am downloading the latest drivers now.

[Mark Miller]

Try view from tool bar and then text size, sometimes the size gets changed around. Hope this is the problem because it's easy to fix.
Mark

[jimmyca69]

no its not that im afraid.

Happens in word and kazaa as well not just explorer.

I have attatched (i hope) a screen dump of the way word looks when you open it up and go to file. This is very strange.

I have updated the drivers but that didnt work either.

[Mark Miller]

Hi Jimmy,
Attachment did not come up
Mark

[jimmyca69]

the bmp image is 1.4mb so cant attatch it :(

[ski]

Check for spyware.
Ad-aware is a decent utility for doing this.

If that does not fix things, then shut down programs running in the background.
If this works, then one of them is the cause.

If still no luck, then uninstall kazaa.
Have heard that it can cause problems.

[jabarnutcase]

I'll second what ski says..

In fact, I would dump KaZaa quicker than I could spell it.
The program is loaded with spyware.
Run Adaware or Spybot Search and Destroy (or both).

(Just to reinforce the point, KaZaa will most likely no longer work after you rid your computer of the spy beasts).

I assume you have run a virus scan- If not, I would also do that asap.
Good luck! ;)

[jimmyca69]

cheers for the help guys,

have run spybot etc and tried various things so did a rebuild on put xp on there instead (had previously used an old hard drive and just put it in new build without formatting - which has probably been the cause of most problems) so thought a rebuild would do the trick. Start a-fresh, yet this has developed its own problem to which i will post a fresh thread - but just in case anyone here knows anything....

I installed winXP on this pc, after formatting the exisiting patition (using ntfs) and it stopped during installation (with 10 mins to go), restarted it fresh again and this time it was fine. Although winXP did seem a little sluggish, but i put that down to me being used to it on my xp2100, 512mb RAM machine at home, and this one is a 1ghz Duron. But during the setup of office2k the machine simply rebooted/restarted with no warning. When it reloaded it said it had recovered from a serious error etc.

So went back to drawing board and started fresh again, formatting hd etc and once up and running everything seemed fine, then boom, was on the net looking at a web page and it restarted again.

ANy ideas?

[ski]

Possible causes:

-Overheating
Check the system and CPU's temps either in BIOS or with temperature monitoring software.
If the system temp gets over 45 deg. C, then remove the computer's cover, and run an external fan. If this fixes things, then install additional case fans. Recommended locations are lower front and upper rear of the case.
If the CPU gets over 60 deg. C, then make sure there is thermal compound between it and the heat sink. If that's ok, then replace the compound with Arctic Silver3 3.
If no luck, then install a higher capacity heat sink fan.
If still no luck, then replace the heatsink with a more efficient unit.

-Overtaxed or bad power supply
Swap it out with a different(preferably higher wattage) unit.

-Bad memory
Remove and reinsert the memory a few times, try it in different slots, do not use any optimal settings for the memory in BIOS, increase the memory's voltage a notch in BIOS, and swap it out with known good memory.
Also, do not mix parity and non-parity memory.

-Everything not completely seated on the motherboard.
Reseat everything.

-Bad MB.
Swap it out with a known good MB.

-IRQ conflict with a network card.
If no problems show up for the NIC in Device Manager, then remove it from DM, shut down, uninstall the card, and restart.

[jimmyca69]

cheers for that ski,

will get on with some of them,

the heat is fine - cpu 40c, system temp 29c. The psu is only 300w and came with the case but i used the same one in my pc originally, using an xp2100 with 3 case fans etc and that worked fine. This pc has 1 case fan and far less components.

Will check the memory, as bought the two sticks of pc2100 128mb seperately.

Was getting blue screen messages in win98se before the rebuild so something is up. Could it be something related to the video problem i had before? eg faulty onboard graphics?

[gwallen4]

You could try this software memory tester called DocMemory. It runs in DOS, so you have to load the program on a boot disk. Actually the download will create the disk for you:


http://www.simmtester.com/PAGE/products/doc/docinfo.asp

[Budfred]

I would also download and run the diagnostics for the hard drive. If you were having the problem before, it could be a failing hard drive.