Driver test does nothing - no test line

[beefy]

Bought three PCs and am onto my 2nd one formatting hard drive, installing XP in Standard PC Mode, optimising XP, etc.

First computer everything installed great and ran Mach driver test at 100 khz and great.

2nd computer - all install files are the same but this time the Mach driver test does nothing. Well it goes through the initialisation then finally says system is under Mach control but there is no test line in the graph area.

Readings are:
CPU Mhz:            3001
Shortest time      33674.794
Longest time       33674.794
Apic Timing Constant       50
Interrupt Used     0
Max variation        0
Average Int         33674.794
Longest Int         0

I re-installed mach after uninstalling the parallel port driver in Device Manager but get the same results.

Installed Machs Special Driver and the driver test seems to work except instead of a straight line I get a black block up to where the line should be and this black block has evenly spaced spikes coming from the top and the bottom.

So far I,ve had only one PC out of four where everything has installed and worked without any issues. Seems to be an element of luck involved with what pc works and which one doesn't.

[Tweakie.CNC]

Beefy,

If your PC has onboard video graphics there is a high probability that it will not work. Fitting a plug-in PCI video card then enabling this and disabling the onboard in BIOS often does the trick - but not always.

Hope this helps.

Tweakie.

[beefy]

Hi Tweakie,

this is about the only one of my computers which isn't using on board graphics, it has an AGP graphics card and no on-board video.

Something interesting I noticed is that after the Mach install I don't get the pop up box telling me the computer will now reboot, so I had to manually reboot. It's the exact same Mach install file as I've used on the other computers and the reboot box comes up at the end of each install so the fact it doesn't on this computer tells me something is wrong

[Hood]

Something interesting I noticed is that after the Mach install I don't get the pop up box telling me the computer will now reboot, so I had to manually reboot.

Was that on the second install of Mach on that computer? If so that is the reason as you only need to reboot the very first time Mach installs the driver, the installer has automatically checked this for some time now so wont reboot if it sees the driver has previously been installed.

Hood

[Tweakie.CNC]

Hi Beefy,

As luck would have it, despite many computers, I have never had this problem except with an old Dell Inspiron laptop and even then the XP optimization cured the problem.

It seems that your PC is running something else in the background perhaps the Windows Task Manager may shed some light ?

Tweakie.

[beefy]

The reboot was done immediately after installation on any occasion, plus after I tried the Special Driver although I don't know if that one was necessary.

As part of my optimisation I go and look at processes to see if there's any "rubbish" running in there. I also totally remove any programs which aren't necesary, mainly Windows programs seeing as there's nothing else installed at this stage, so I'm talking about Internet Explorer, MSN, Outlook Express, etc.

Bit of a head scratcher this one. I'm just going to reformat and re-install XP and see what happens. If I get the same problem I'll look into the bios settings. Nothing to lose if I stuff something up there, but I can always re-set them to there defaults via the motherboard.

Thanks guys,

Keith.

[ger21]

Before you install windows, try disabling ACPI in the bios.

[beefy]

Hi Gerry,

no luck I'm afraid but I did learn how to hack the bios. This computer has an Award bios where disabling ACPI is not an option. Spent several hours Googling and learning and finally managed to access the hidden bios options with a utility called Modbin6 (made me feel slightly Geeky).

Did a fresh installation of XP & Mach with ACPI disabled in the bios but same results. I'm giving up on this computer now, better off spending another $40 and getting another computer. Does get to me though when I can't find the root of the problem.

Thanks very much for your help,

Keith.