I probably should know what to do with this sort of Q, but when it's your own PC it's sometimes easier to miss things, so the extra help would be appeciated:
Built a new PC and put XP SP2 on it (then installed SP3). This has caused numerous problems with IE (I probably should've upgraded to IE7 before installing SP3, but I'll probably end up repairing it later on and starting again from SP2 - so not a lot to worry about there. Only real problem with XP is the sound not working. In the Realtek HD Sound Manager - when I do the various sound tests, everything works, but no sound device is listed in the Sound control panel applet. The Realtek item is listed in the Device Manager - although there is an item called Multimedia Device (can't remember what the 2nd word was exactly) which comes up as not being installed.
The main problem is with Vista Ultimate x86 (also occurs after installing SP1). The problem is that the PC freezes completely - can't do anything besides hard-reset. Most occasions are random - there's no real time delay (sometimes a few mins from booting up, sometimes 2 hours afterwards). It's winter here so I'm not expecting it to be a heat issue. All components are brand new except for the TV Tuner (PCI card) and a secondary networking PCI card. The computer was built last Wednesday. I haven't tested the RAM yet, it's also brand new.
I've played around with various display and motherboard drivers, but because the hardware is new there's not a lot of choices.
I've noted that there are certain actions that can cause the freeze - the most outstanding one is when I go to change the desktop wallpaper and I select the Dreamscene content page. All the items appear (although the video previews don't come up) - and then it hangs.
I'm really looking forward to fixing these issues so that I can use the PC to it's full potential. I've been toying with the idea of installing Vista x64 as another dual-boot option, but am not sure if that would be a trouble-free OS to use either.
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