Area 51 M 7700 - couple problems

Hey everyone! My current PC is an Area 51-M 7700 that's been going for almost 5 years. It works fine when It boots up, aside from the DVD drive not being able to read certain types of DVDs...

BUT: Before I can boot it, the strangest thing.

It has to be cold to the touch before it can boot up, and before it CAN boot up, I have to stand on one foot, spin 360 degrees, and touch my nose for it to display the AW Splashscreen then continue to booting.

(Hold the POWER button for a few seconds, open the CD/DVD-RW drive, close it, then hold the power button for a couple seconds but not long enough to shut it down.)

Weird.....

Then our friend the white blinking cursor in the top left appears. Then it can start up.

Now, I haven't replaced the thermal gunk at all since I bought it, it hasn't been used for 1 of the 5 years. Do you think it could be the thermal detector? I have a thermal utility installed (Get Thermal.)

The CPU is at a steady 55 C, the GPU around 60 C.

Also, the second issue is - Where in the heck do you get drivers for this GPU with Windows 7?

Cliffs notes:

Where are drivers for my 6800 Go GPU? The Laptop2Video site had no results when I inputted the specific hardware ID.

What's causing this bizarre boot-up behavior?

Thanks in advance, everyone!

Steve

Alright, need to go grab a tube of thermal compound from RadioShack I guess.

Also regarding the driver updates for the 6800 Go. I went into Windows Update, it found all the language packs, and a Ethernet controller update, but no GPU update. It says I have a "standard VGA connection, which means Windows thinks the 256 MB is 0 MB, and games detect it as that, which is kind of lame.

I don't play games THAT much, but it's annoying, and I'd like this over-priced machine to be at it's full potential.

If you could point me in the correct direction (I'm a newb to W7, XP is much different.) I'd appreciate i.

Once again, thanks for the advice Q!

Steve

I spin 360 degrees counterclockwise, and sometimes have to hop on one foot afterwards.

Baking... that sounds interesting, right now at this moment I'm snacking on shrimp-flavored baked chips. Pretty interesting to say the least!

A cooking section you say? I shall meander over there.

Last resort? So, the card may be failing as indicated by your comment. Baking... is it as difficult as parallel parking your car for the first time?

When I had Win XP installed it ran Oblivion / PlanetSide / 6 clients of EQ just fine (EQ Emu boxing - don't ask!)

How would I check for a short, I'm kind of apprehensive about tinkering around with this thing. I actually did a little bit, but not quite as deep as "baking" the GPU.

-Switched Hard drives, because the stock Samsung one finally died after 5 years.

-Installed a few memory sticks

-re-attached the keyboard / set the CMOS.

The motherboard revision is 5.3, I heard the 5 series has lots of overheating issues..

Alright to sum it up in cliffs notes once more:

-The spin dynamics along with actions required makes my machine boot in different ways. Sometimes I just have to hold the power-on button for a few seconds, don't have to do a 360 spin, and it just starts right up. This is after being powered off over night.

-GPU cooking/baking.. yeah I'll check that out.

-Trying some proprietary Vista drivers is a good idea, Win 7 looks more like Vista than XP.

Anyhow, thanks a million fellas.

Steve

Oh of course, I don't want to BBQ the GPU, these things cost as much as it is to build a low-end PC.

I was referring to checking out the section ;-)

Regards,
Steve

PS:

Hey thanks qhn, I actually did install some drivers for my 7700. They are the 175.19, I had to 'creatively' install them.

I unzipped the file to the desktop, DL'd the modded .inf, slapped 'er in the folder.. and installed them via 'have disk' in device manager.

And yes, I'm glad I didn't have to eat my 6800 for dinner.

The other issue still occurs though, but I didn't go out to get any thermal gunk yet. Under load, the 6800 is fine, as is the P4.. I don't know if the boot issue is a heating thing actually, it might be a optical drive problem.

When I power it on, the DVD-CD combo drive doesn't get recognized as fast as it used to, hence the black screen continues before the AW splash => boot-strap sequence.

It's a QSI SBW242B and it doesn't read DVD-RWs, but reads DVD-R's fine.

Anyhow, thanks for your assistance qhn, the thing actually has graphical acceleration now.

Steve

A new drive? My system's been out of warranty for a few years. Will they send a new one if I pay for it?

Just wondering, because they have an issue with suddenly not supporting stuff rather quickly.

I'll check out the device manager qhn, thanks!

Okay, this is over a month's worth of a bump... My 7700 has been working wonderfully since I last posted, and I had to do the same thing every time to get it working. BUT it did work, and it worked for long periods of time....

I had to hold the power button for a few seconds to get it to power-on, then open/close the DVD-tray after it clicked a few times, and then hold the power button for a moment, then the splashscreen comes up, POST begins, all that.



NOW it won't work, it's just stuck at a blank screen with all the fancy blue LEDS on with all the fans running properly.

(Attached is a really horrible netbook webcam picture of my 12 LB $2800 paperweight.)

I've done some research here before this post, and this issue seems to be a DEAD MoBo? That's odd, because yesterday I did everything with it except use it as a kitchen sink! I played some EMU EQ, Watched a movie, surfed the web, did some classwork, listened to my music... no hitches.

The computer ran relatively cool, Get thermal never went above 60*C, so I don't know if the motherboard fried or what.... Am I left with the option to strip it down and sell the parts? Or is there some kind of magical thing I can do to get it to run.

Please help if anyone can, I truly would appreciate it, Thanks!

Steve

So you think I should bake my 6800 Go (Non-Ultra, first card that came with the system - works fine afaik?)


Also, I left it off for a long period of time, removed the battery, removed the keyboard & the metal shield guarding the guts of this monster... and reset the battery. (Flipped the Li-Ion battery upside-down for 5 seconds, and then reseated it.)

Put the KB back in, and plugged the powerbrick back in...

Same thing, so I tilt it at a an angle which pointed the bottom of the 7700 toward me... and I note the screen turns on! The AW logo screen comes back, says no RAID array, no biggie, go to BIOS (which is now reset to default version, woot!) and tell it to boot in ATA mode instead of RAID mode.


So it's still cooling off, I'll probably go to sleep now and try to turn it on again when I wake up.

Now, back to the baking matters at hand....

Does baking the graphics card fix this issue or something? Never done it before, and I hope to avoid having to do it, it sounds like an ugly procedure.


Thanks for the reply once more qhn, and thanks for the assistance you gave me over a month ago.

Well whaddya know, it works now.. I guess it was just hiccuping. I actually reset the CMOS battery again, and made sure it was very secure before rebooting it on my previous post!

But if baking stops this annoying ritual I have to go through to boot my machine up, so be it !

Thanks for your suggestions qhn & PowerPack, all the best to you ! I'll probably be posting again soon maybe.. But I might just sell this thing tbh. I saw you had quoted someone else's 7700 at $600-700, mine has just the 3 GHZ 1 MB P4 though, so probably $450-500 I guess. It DOES have 3 gigs of memory though.

Regards,
Steve