Weekend Group Log still to come, and problems with XP

I am still waiting to log this weeks group. We actually went for doing a good fun robot brawling and racing day, using the Lego Manas to build robots and our small arena setup. Photos and full log to come.

The reason the photos and the rest are on hold, is I have been having horrible troubles with a new motherboard and processor setup I bought. I invested in an AMD Sempron and a Gigabyte K8NS motherboard. Since fitting it, I was having trouble booting into Windows XP, and on a safe mode boot up, it stopped after loading “mup.sys”. After a great deal of searching, it turns out that the next thing to load is a critical XP component - part of the kernel.

This was worrying - as it could be hardware problems or conflicts, or it could simply be drivers. As I had recently used the same mobo and processor combination in another machine with no problems, I was worrying that I had missed something or let the processor overheat.

There were suggestions to use the repair mode of windows setup - which didn’t work, to try and reinstall - which always ended up the same way. After a few days of really playing with it - moving memory cards around, removing all the USB devices, stripping it down to basics, I finally saw a thread on the nForce chipset and this problem which suggested it was the nForce SW IDE drivers, which are installed by the motherboard driver disk, but are optional when using the nVidia reference drivers.

It turned out that was the culprit, and by not installing it, my system seems to be okay. Now one application I am wary of is Semantic Norton Systemworks - which was the last application installed before the whole thing started. I will be trying it with a little caution tonight.

If it all works - I will be definitely blogging the weekends activities fully. Until then I don’t have access to the computer with the photos on it.