Win XP will be the death of me!

[lhatkins]

Surely if it was that, the live CD wouldn't work. Try installin Linux onto the hard disk.

Good Idea Tenson, this will be my next move.
As I don't have a life and needed to sort this problem out I spent yesterday trying to fix this. I borrowed another hard drive and installed xp on it (trying to rule out the hard drive as faulty), it installed ok, until I installed the VIA chipset drivers on it, I used the latest drivers from Via's website. It didnt' like that at all, had to safe mode and get rid of them. So I installed the ones from the motherboard CD, these seemed to work better but XP was stuck if "classic mode", installed the certified Nvidia drivers which fixed the graphics and theme problems. Installed the Via Raid drivers, bang, another Bsod, think a theme is starting to form here. I did however manage to get Service Pack 2 insalled which is something I couldn't do on the other drive.
So now I'm leaning towards it being a VIA driver issue or chipset fault, but again there is no way to test it. You did say tht VIA have problems with their chipsets, I think this is proff of that, if it does turn out to be a VIA issue, I will ensure this is the last board I buy with a VIA chipset
So yes, time to insall Linux and see how it gets on. Like I say the live cd was faultless.

Again thanks for all the help and advice, maybe we could have a comptuer geeks corner of the forum for posts like these ?? hehe

 

[Tenson]

If you want to change to P4 I will be selling my mobo soon. It is very, very good (I place a lot of importance on a mobo). It's a Gigabyte GA-8IK1100. It runs on an Intel 875P chipset, built in sound, network, firewire, usb. Has Dual channel RAM support, SATA the lot. http://www.giga-byte.com/MotherBoard/Products/Products_GA-8IK1100 (Rev 2.x).htm

Personally I wont even consider a mobo that uses anything other than an Intel chipset for the reasons you are finding out. VIA and SIS are bollox IMO. I don't think there is much wrong with AMD cpu's but the motherboards let them down so badly. Having said that the AMD numbering is odd. On real life tests the P4 3.5GHz beat the AMD 4000 64bit thing by a fair bit? hardly like a 4000mhz Intel cpu then, which I believe is how they market it.

 

[lhatkins]

If you want to change to P4 I will be selling my mobo soon. It is very, very good (I place a lot of importance on a mobo). It's a Gigabyte GA-8IK1100. It runs on an Intel 875P chipset, built in sound, network, firewire, usb. Has Dual channel RAM support, SATA the lot. http://www.giga-byte.com/MotherBoard/Products/Products_GA-8IK1100 (Rev 2.x).htm

Personally I wont even consider a mobo that uses anything other than an Intel chipset for the reasons you are finding out. VIA and SIS are bollox IMO. I don't think there is much wrong with AMD cpu's but the motherboards let them down so badly. Having said that the AMD numbering is odd. On real life tests the P4 3.5GHz beat the AMD 4000 64bit thing by a fair bit? hardly like a 4000mhz Intel cpu then, which I believe is how they market it.

Beleive me this is a tempting idea, but it would involve buying another cpu and Intels are expensive, which I why I went the AMD route in the first place (false ecconomey?? probably).

Well I've wiped the drive and reinstalled again, but being carefull which driver versions I'm using, I have got sp2 to install and so far things are working normally, but trying not to speak too soon, still don't have any confidence in it!

 

[lhatkins]

Managed to trace the peoblem in the end, after surfing though a few forums, it seems that Asus is very fussy about the memory it will support, although there is nothing wrong with the memory I'm using, if its not listed as "supported" it doesn't seem to work at full speed, the way around this is to slow it down and run it as DDR333 (not DDR400). This is very bad of Asus IMHO, they may fix this with later bios updates. But at least I have a stable system again, I can now get on with other things.