Things that make you go NOOOO!

[General Mortars]

I swear it sounded like a marvelous idea at the time.
I have a

Asus motherboard P4P800/GD-EAY
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4800 SE
1 Gb RAM
WinXP

And I got the chance to add another 1Gb Ram to my machine.

No problem there, two 512 Mb plaques coming through.

Little I knew about what I was getting myself into.

Now...

- My computer shuts down.
Completelly. Puff. I may be in the middle of a Photoshop session, handling a 250 Mb image (which means I only save every 50 minutes) and Woosh! Computer turns off. No Blue Screen of Death, no bleeping sound no nothing.
Just Woosh! it goes and I get to see the reflection of my face in the black screen.

- I have a 20Gb main hardrive (and a 130 Gb slave to store all my doodles) which usually has 6 Gb of used space for apps (Photoshops, Windows XP, Painters, ocasional freeware etc, etc).
Had. Past tense.
I have NO idea of what happened overnight, but I now only have 1,55 Gb space free; I cleaned the disk, tried to run a defrag/tried to run a virus can (computer insists on shutting down when I do this), dumped ALL temporary flies, hell I haven´t had my computer this clean since I bought it fresh from the store 3 months ago.
And yet something is eating away 19,5 GB of my main hardrive´s space.

I desperatelly need ANY help you can forward me, as I have a truckloadillion pics to colour til the end of this week, yet it´s already wednesday and I´m still on the first one.

I don´t mind sacrifying the two 512 Mb Ram plaques ( now there´s 100 euros down the drain...), but even though it clearly must be the rooot of my computer problems, I really hope a solution can be found elsewhere.

Help.
Any help.

[pixel]

Well, your first move should be to take out the new RAM sticks and see if your PC runs OK.

From your post it seems you were adding 1GB to 1GB you already had. I hope you knew that usually you need to buy exact same specification RAM from the same company, because it usually will not work with other types.

I am guessing you would have already tried taking the new sticks out, so your next step would be to remove all the components, until you have the bare essentials, then try it and reinsert the other parts one by one until you hit problems, then you will know what part is causing the problems. However this is probably unlikely to be your troubles.

It may also be a hard drive problem, as it has affected both drives and will not let you access either. If you can, I would suggest trying to get an old hard drive, load your OS to it, and put in each of your other drives, one at a time, as slaves. This would hopefully let you check for viruses because, and if you find any, try and repair them, then fully format the old drive to make sure there are no viruses on that that could load onto the next PC you put it in.

[EwanG]

I'd also be curious to see if Windows decided with the other Gig of RAM to make a significant investment in adding to your System Swap/Cache without bothering to tell you (which would explain at least 1.5 Gigs of your HD disappearing). Might be worth looking into.

FWIW,
Ewan

[General Mortars]

Thank you for the repplies, folks, I really appreciate your help .

Unfortunatelly, I´m on a deadline here (already lost two days on this nonsense), so I couldn´t do much experimentation.

So, I just dumped one of the sticks (VM5 12MB DDR PC400) and kept the other that has the same specs and Bus speed (I believe that´s what the person who installed them said, some three-digit number ended in ?33) as the other previous two.
I now have 1.5 GB RAM DDR.
(That´s 512 Mb more than I had yesterday and 512 Mb less than what I payed for.)

The good:
My computer hasn´t shut down yet and I even managed to finish a couple pages in Photoshop in the last few hours.....

The Bad:
,....... but the memory space in the main hardrive is still puzzling me.
1.59 Gb memory free?
How can I have 19,5 GB space filled after a massive clean up on all temporary files?


The Ugly:
I´m starting to miss my old Celeron 700 Mhz WinMe. At least then I knew what to expect.....
I tellya, computers................ sheesh.........

[RabidDog]

photoshop temporary files that have been marked as read only? or somehow orphaned? or drastic shutdown has caused TOc error on you hard drive, probably requiring reformat to correct. try scandisk or some such utility to check your partitions. The shutdown could be originally caused by inadequate power supply, as ram can be quite juicy. Or many systems can only have three sticks of ram in total (up to 3gb).

[General Mortars]

According to the technician that setup my machine, I have 4 slots for 4 1Gig Ram sticks.

I think the shutdown was related to compatibility issues with the one stick that had a different speed (400), though I have no idea why.

My main concern is the memory loss; your theory makes sense since I only registered the 19,5 Gb hardrive space filled after the first shutdown that may have played a number in the HD.
Geez, the mere idea of having to reformat and reinstall WinXP when I´m already on a tight deadline....

[RabidDog]

Try partmagic7 and/or ghost as they are good. But dont attempt anything in haste you will fork it up. Finish off your work then worry about your disk. 20gb disk with only 1.5gb showing? save off the 1.5gb (ghost) reformat the disk then restore your backup (ghost). Or make your 120gb your boot disk and re-install your backed up partition on that one, on a seperate partition.

[General Mortars]

Okay, problem solved.

Thanks for the help, RabidDog

Truth is I found out this was all due to my distraction.
I cleaned the disk, yes, but going back for a new sweep with a fine-tooth comb I found a 11 Gb size temp file.
Ugh.

Well, crisis solved

[Jester700]

In 20/20 hindsight...
Never make system changes while on a deadline, and always back up beforehand.