Okay an update:
After spending many hours trying to resolve this, this is the latest situation.
I have been told that the motherboard is an
EVGA nForce 750i SLI, yet the splash screen on startup announces
ASUS P5N-D and indeed the motherboard itself has '
P5N-D' printed on it. No label saying 'ASUS' though.
She was getting random freezing / unresponsive pc / lockup / BSoD and Driver Power State Failure error message.
The PC does the above at varying times between around 30 sec to several minutes -
see post #4 this thread.
We looked in BIOS:
- Advanced Tab > Chipset > Spread Spectrum Control was enabled and we disabled this.
- Advanced Tab > Onboard Device Control > Plug and Play OS was set to 'No' we changed this to 'Yes'.
- Advanced Tab > Onboard Device Configuration > IDE Function Setup
The following were all set to 'Enabled'
- OnChip Channel0
- OnChip Channel1
- IDE DMA Transfer Access
- SATA Controller 1,2
- SATA DMA Transfer
- SATA Port 3,4
- SATA 2 DMA Transfer
- IDE Prefetch Mode
Power Tab > ACPI Suspend Type - set to S1 & S3 (other options available S1(POS) and S3(STR) )
Tools Tab has
- ASUS OC Profile
- ASUS EZ Flash 2
CURRENT ROM
- BOARD P5N-D
- VERSION 0502
- DATE 04 02 2008
No other settings seemed to be applicable.
Question: Do you think it is safe to flash the BIOS from the
ASUS website - there are numerous BIOS versions - the latest being
1401 dated
2010/07/01. Interestingly there are versions 0302, 0304, 0402, 0601 but no version 0502. Could 0502 be a 'special' version for EVGA??
We took the SSD out of the machine and attached it to another PC as a USB drive & checked it. No errors.
Put the SSD back into the PC.
Then we took out the new RAM from slots 1 & 3 leaving the original 4GB of RAM in slots 0 and 2. PC ran happily for around 30 min then locked up. Tried the original RAM in slots 1 & 3 (0 and 2 empty), the new RAM in slots 0 & 2 (1 & 3 empty) and in slots 1 & 3 (slots 0 & 2 empty). Same restults.
Then we tried the following.
After doing much Googling, she'd found the following webpage:
Driver power state failure [Windows 10, Nvidia, SSD]
It suggests several things (one being to download a tool which will fix it!) such as updating the drivers (another tool to download), altering the Power Plan Settings (Solution 5 - which we did), changing the power settings in Nvidia Control Panel (Solution 8 – which we did) and changing your device’s power options (Solution 9 – which we did).
The PC then ran for an hour without a problem at which point (at gone 11pm) we switched off.
Not convinced it is fixed, but it is looking good. Only caveat is that it only has 4GB of RAM installed (the original Corsair XMS2 DDR2 memory) in slots 0 & 2 rather than the 8GB that she'd like.
Given that the PC now seems to be working okay (going to give it an extended 'soak test' later, I'm inclined to leave the BIOS version as is. I may fit the additional 4GB of RAM before doing this.
EDIT: We'd put the extra 4GB of RAM in last night - can't remember at what point but towards the end of testing.
One extra 'nugget' of information - one of those things that when folks mention it you go "Why didn't you say that first!" and the answer is that you didn't think it was relevant. She is using the PC mainly to play games on the Steam platform. I don't know much about this but it seems to install a small-ish program on the PC but essentially run the game on-line (is that correct?) The PC was locking up when playing games on this platform. Relevant? Who knows?
Sorry for the short novel here but this is the latest after I have been able to get my hands on the machine!
Thoughts?
Zaph
