Hello, my name is Alex, I am new to this list. I have anightmare PC that I 
desperately need help with. It’s not been working as it should since July 
2001. It’s been round friends houses and computer shops butno one has been 
able to fix it. I feel it may be necesary to tell you its whole history 
incase there's anything I've overlooked, so appologies for the length of this 
post! Any help would really be very much apreciated.

I brought the thing around March this year off a mate. He supplied the 
motherboard (KT7 A RAID), the CPU (Athlon Duron 700, clocked to 850), the 
graphics card (NVidea G-Force MX) a 56k internal modem and a 20 gighard drive 
while I pinched the CD-ROM, floppy drive and Sound Blaster Live 1024 out of 
my old computer. We set everything up nicely until it came to soundcard.It 
kept freezing while it was installing. My mate knew a guy who may have 
beenable to fix it, and sure enough he did. He put my old 2 gig hard drive in 
there so I could get my old files back. I planned to copy the files over to 
the 20 gig and then disconnect the 2 gig because it was starting to sound 
quite dodgy. When I did disconnect the drive though, my computer wouldn’t 
boot up and I got ‘fatal exception’ blue screen of death. So I plugged it 
back in and it worked again. I then kind of forgot about it and just left it 
there and never used it.

The new system was sweet. It ran brilliantly. It would only occasionally 
crash just before windows 98 started. It would come up with a black screen 
with vertical lines about three pixels tall running across the top of the 
screen.

I mainly use my computer for music so I decided to buy a CD writer. I fit it 
and it worked. I then tried to fit my old CD drive so I could copy CD’s but I 
couldn’t get them both to work. I tried plugging the ribbon cables in 
different places, e.g. in the primary and secondary sockets, and then I found 
that the computer wouldn’t boot up at all, even though I put the cables back 
how they were. I tried many ways of getting it to boot, including resetting 
the BIOS (big mistake!) I then found out, to my horror that I had actually 
managed to bend a pin on my 20 gig hard drive.

I went out and brought a new 20 gig hard drive and reinstalled everything 
myself. The soundcard problem came back. The guy who fixed it is now at uni 
at the opposite end of the country and I can’t get hold of him. So that’s 
when I took it round a computer shop. They couldn’t fix it. This went on for 
ages. According to the mate of the guy who fixed it, he got it to work by 
clicking on SB16 emulation in device manager and then clicking on Enable LTP 
sharing. He may have also tweaked the BIOS. 

I gave up on that soundcard and brought a cheap new one. I fitted it and it 
worked, however my PC now freezes far to often. Every time a PCI device is in 
use, 7 times out of 10 it will freeze. The only PCI devices I have are the 
modem and the new soundcard. The graphics card is AGP. The chances of it 
freezing go up when they are both in use. Also, the soundcard will not record 
at all. It freezes instantly when I try and record. My computer also freezes 
very often when playing Unreal Tournament. When I try and play on line it 
will always freeze, 100%. I noticed that when playing offline it would freeze 
less if I switched the sound to Low Quality.

I worked out that the times when it will always freeze are when something is 
being input into the devices, i.e. sound when the soundcard is recoding, and 
game data when playing games online. 

I doubt very much this is in IRQ conflict because the soundcard is on IRQ 5 
and the modem is on 9. I also know that there are no onboard graphics or 
sound on the motherboard that could be causing this.

The other thought is a virus. Is there such thing as a virus that can survive 
multiple reformats? Another thing that made me think thatperhaps this is a 
virus is the time when I got a blue screen. I pressed a key to get rid of it 
and all the letters except ‘n’ and ‘o’ disappeared. This lookslike a virus, 
but whether it is causing all the other problems is hard to tell. One other 
thing is that I installed a program called Zone Alarm which keeps coming up 
with messages like this: "The firewall has blocked Internet access to your 
computer (HTTP) from 148.245.184.147 (TCP Port 3051)." This has happened 
several times and it has been a different IP address each time. Are these 
people trying to access my computer from another one? I use another program 
called Morphius which is very similar to Napster. People can upload my files 
that are in a certain folder and can download theirs. Is it the users from 
this program it is detecting?

Is it possible that the guy who fixed my soundcard the first time tweaked the 
BIOS to get everything working nicely and then I buggered it up by resetting 
it?

This has been bugging me for ages now. If anyone could help would be sooooo 
happy :-).

Alex E Onslow

               The NOSPIN Group Promotions is now offering
              Mandrake Linux or Red Hat Linux CD sets along
         with our NOSPIN Power Linux CD...  at a great price!!!
             http://freepctech.com/goodies/promotions.shtml