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dlammers
03-03-2002, 10:19 PM
I'm having trouble with my home-built PC. When listening to music files, they occasionally stutter,skip,etc. and other times a single application will run extremely slow (ex: mouse skippping across screen or overly long load times). My system has an ECS K7S5A Motherboard/SIS735 chips set, a 1 gig Athlon processor 512mb of DDR Ram, a 16mb Vodoo PCI video card, and a one-year old WD 7200 rpm 20 gig hard drive. Initially, I bought a bare-bones kit (with a K7AMA board, and put my graphics card and hard drive in it with 128mb of sdram. I immediately had the problems described above, so I ordered a 256mb stick of DDR ram. I couldn't get the Motherboard to accept the DDR ram, so it traded it out on the newer K7S5A board, and an additional 256 mb of DDR ram. After getting the system back up and running with the new board and the 512 mb of DDR ram, I'm still having the same problems.A system like this just shouldn't be having this kind of problem, in my mind at least. Could someone give me some advice on what I could troubleshoot, or what things to check. Also, would putting a Sound Blaster (or other) sound card in make a difference? Any help here would be greatly appreciated, my teenager thinks that Morpheus and MP3 files are a basic human need and is driving me nuts.

mjc
03-03-2002, 10:49 PM
Onboard audio?

Which Windows version?

Fresh install after the motherboard upgrade?

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mjc
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Celts are the men that heaven made mad, For all their battles are merry and their songs are all sad.

dlammers
03-03-2002, 10:52 PM
The OS is 98SE and no, I haven't done a fresh install. I'll start by trying those. Thanks.

HokieStone
03-05-2002, 01:58 PM
Does the motherboard have "onboard audio"? If so, did you install the Motherboard Drivers?

Another thing...is the 512MB ram on 1 stick? If so, check to make sure that the Bios accepts 512MB in one slot, some boards have a max of 256 per slot? Also, make sure that the Ram speed is compatible with the Mobo speed, i.e. if you're running PC-1600 on a 266MHz FSB, then this could cause some of the problems...and if you've just upgraded the RAM, make sure you bought the same speed.

A new sound card should help, but you will have to make sure that the Mobo allows you to disable any "onboard audio" that you may have on the board.

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Jack of all trades, master of none.