OK, so I just wrote this question out, and then considered putting under "desktops" subcategory, and when i clicked on it the body of my post vanished, and it was still gone when I clicked "back" =\ So I'll do my best to rewrite it and not leave anything out...
I'm troubleshooting a problem that my buddy has been experienceing for awhile, the symptom is tricky to describe, which makes it almost impossible to do websearches for information on it... Here's the best description I can come up with:
It occurs during video gaming or video benchmarking. The benchmark tool is 3dMark03 (the newer one) and the games are planetside and Star Wars Galaxies. Since it happens consistently and predictably in 3dmark, we've been using that during our testing, but there are minor differences when it happens in the games... Anyway, the first test of 3dmark runs fine, the second test comes up with some major frame rate drops (which by itself is not surprising, it is 3dmark after all...) but there also occurs some major texture dropping, distortion and other bizarre effects that I honestly can't describe. 3d mark crashes near the beginning of the third test every time. In the games the same thing happens, a huge frame rate hit, as well as some of the texxtures disappearing. In Star Wars Galaxies for instance it will run very smoothly, then all of a sudden 90% of the texturess drop, leaving you looking at the avatars head, and maybe a few odds and ends, all the surrounding objects, textures, everything is gone meanwhile it's running at 2 fps. Now it's worth mentioning that it is not network related, we were playing side by side when it happened, and i could still see him running around online with no problem as he was moving with his keyboard, it was just his video that slowed down. An interesting part about the games though is that alt tabbing out and then back in fixes the problem for about an hour, then it will come back. His system isn't very beefy, but he runs smooth as butter all the time until this weird thing occurs out of the blue. We'll be playing planetside in a huge 300 man firefight with no problems, and the symptom will occur in an empty base somewhere for no good reason. It is not explicitly performance related, but when we first start up a game, we can urge it to occur by running into a heavily populated area, however after the alt tab thing, that same kind of performance stress won't bring it back for a very long time.
I've troubleshot the hell out of his machine, but before I get into that here are his system specs:
AMD Athlon XP 2200
PNY Nvidia Geforce4 Ti4200
a7m266 Asus MoBo agp 4x, Via chipsets
256 mb 2100 ddr ram, 512 mb 2700 ddr ram
Western Digital 80 GB harddrive
Power Man 300W power supply
Before I messed with any of his hardware I had him install the drivers for his MoBo's Via chipset, including the agp driver, that helped his performance but didn't change the problem, he flashed his bios with the latest release, as well as a beta one, but that didn't do anything at all. We've reinstalled his video drivers at least 25 times, including the lates ones from nvidia the useless winxp ones, the lates forceware ones, and some archived nvidia ones I had from the past year, all of which did nothing. Each time I made sure to uninstall the old drivers then reboot even though nvidia drivers do that automatically when you install them... We reinstalled directx, disabled extra services, ran numerous spyware checks, turned off absolutely every conceivable thing that could be running in the background. All of this was happening on a relatively fresh Operating System as well(windows updated all the way). After all that we had to move on to testing the hardware itself and upgrading some things as we went along.
First I told him to get some Ram, I was pretty sure that was the problem, but I hadn't seen it in person yet at that point.. All he had was the 256 stick, and then he bought the 512, but that didn't help the symptom, although it did help a lot of other things.
Next I had him upgrade his cpu, he was using an Athlon 1.3 ghz something-or-other, now he has the Athlon XP 2200, but that didn't change anything either, the problem occurs with both processors.
I tested his ram, first by leaving the 512 stick in there. I was worried that the two different speeds might be the problem even though they both run at 2100. with one stick or the other or both the problem persisted...
Next we tested his video card, i put it in my machine and the thing runs fine. When I put my card in his machine though ( an Albatron geforce fx 5600 256mb) all kinds of odd things happened, his desktop came up with some weird pixel effects, as you moved the mouse around the pixels would change a little. It wasn't really a regular "smear" since it looked like the distortion was superimposed on top of the original desktop, but the distortion itself would smear... After that, I tried to get it to work by uninstalling the card and rebooting all kinds of stuff, but the machine always crashed after about 45 seconds on the desktop.. it was weird.
I wanted to put my hard drive in his box to see if the problem had something to do with his OS config, or to see if the problem woiuld occur on my machine with his hard drive, but I never got to see since I ran into another problem entirely with that. (see my other post about swapping hard drives with winxp) Basically, I can't put my hard drive in his machine and he can't put his in mine, which strikes me as very very strange, as well as troublesome since it looks like we may have to replace his motherboard, and he may not be able to boot up his existing OS with a new MoBo...
My conclusion so far, without being able to test with a different instance of WinXP, is that his MoBo sucks.. the video card thing was worrisome. His video card is fine, his ram is almost certainly fine, his processors are fine, I don't think it's his power supply, it's not a chipset or video card driver issue. I don't know what else to do, but maybe you folks have some ideas or questions or suggestions or etc.. Thanks in advance for any help.
