[newbe]

Hey, what's up forum? This is my first post on here, but more than likely will be my most important one. My computer specs are listed at the bottom of my post, but if anyone needs to know anything more, feel free to ask. I apologize for the long...

Hey, what's up forum? This is my first post on here, but more than likely will be my most important one. My computer specs are listed at the bottom of my post, but if anyone needs to know anything more, feel free to ask. I apologize for the long post, but I figure if I give you everything you'll need, then the amount of questions will be minimized.

I just finished building two separate computers for my workplace (I do CAD design for a special-purpose airboat-building company). One of them runs basic programs (no CAD work involved, so no CAD software installed on that one), and the other (mine) runs top-end hardware and Autodesk Inventor 2009 Series. Both run Vista Ultimate 64-bit.

For my boot drive, I have two 32GB OCZ solid-state drives running in RAID 1 (mirroring for OS backup purposes). I also run an internal 1TB Samsung HDD, used to store data, as well as a Fantom Drives 2TB external HDD for backup. On the non-CAD support machine, I had relatively minor issues when building it, which (thankfully) are resolved now. For the CAD machine, I have had major issues. I've installed Vista twice on this machine in the same day, but I'll concentrate on the second install, since it is (was) more stable.

The major problem that I'm having right now is that when I'm working on this computer, I will be right in the middle of doing a CAD drawing, and suddenly the computer will turn the screen a solid color (so far it has been gray, like the background in AutoCAD, teal, like the Windows 95 default desktop color, and olive green, which I can't compare to anything). Nothing is accessible, the cursor doesn't show. If I want to restart, I have to press the reset button once, and then a few seconds go by and the computer restarts, or I can hold the power button down and it will shut off.

I thought originally that it was a problem with AutoCAD, since it was only happening while I would be working in CAD, and the screen would turn the same color as the CAD background (gray). However, the other two colors had me baffled. Teal? Olive green? Anyone have any ideas? So far, my bosses have been understanding, and luckily we're also running AutoCAD 2005 on a laptop in the office. However, we are on a government contract, and time is of the essence. We can't afford the down-time of having the main CAD computer keep coughing and sputtering.

My thoughts now are that it's potentially a hardware problem. The BIOS is a brand new updated flash. I have used either Windows Update or the individual manufacturer websites to find the latest driver releases for all of the hardware components. By the way, the method that LG uses to install the monitor driver is absolutely ludicrous -- rather than simply using the GUI to install it, you must navigate through the device manager and locate the driver on the CD (I know this is how some prefer to do it, but for all intents and purposes, this is my work computer and not my personal one). Currently, I'm running the monitor through an analog cable, connected to a DVI-Analog adapter. Is there a possibility that the monitor isn't decoding the signal correctly and is causing it to lock up? When the monitor changes color, it seems as though Windows might still be running, but I haven't hooked up another monitor to check.

I've updated the Quadro FX 4800 drivers, through Microsoft Update, but I'm checking to see if there are newer ones direct from PNY. UPDATE: I found version 169.96 (seems to be the latest one that is coming from their website, though the one that downloaded through Microsoft Update has a later build date when I look at it in the device manager). Any chances that the driver I got through Microsoft Update could be causing these issues?

I have run Spybot to see if there's any spyware on here -- there isn't. However, in advanced mode when I did the system internals registry check, it showed a great deal of inconsistencies. I'm assuming that is because I defrag'd after I installed the 7GB install of Inventor. Most of the inconsistencies resided in the Autodesk registries. So I repaired the installation of all the Autodesk products, and those inconsistencies aren't showing up any more. The ones that are, however, are related to the .NET framework, which I know Autodesk uses to interact with many of its programs. How would I go about repairing the .NET framework so these inconsistencies get resolved?

I'm at my wits' end trying to figure this issue out. One more thing I can think of -- I also run a 3D Connexion SpaceNavigator on here, and it was one of the programs that had a bad file path, which I relocated. In all honesty right now, I can't think of anything else.

Chkdisk found nothing, spybot found no spyware, Intel Matrix Storage Manager found no errors in the drives, etc, etc. None of the utilities I've used have come up with any errors whatsoever, but I'm obviously still having this problem. Any help anyone can give is much appreciated. Thanks!



Mobo: Intel DX58SO -- Processor: Intel Core i7 965 3.20 GHz -- Video: PNY Quadro FX 4800 -- Memory: 6GB OCZ Gold 1600MHz -- Hard Drives: Boot - Dual OCZ 32GB SSD's in RAID 1, Data - Samsung SpinPoint F 1TB -- Optical: LG GBW-H20L -- Monitor: 25.5" LG W2600H -- OS: Vista Ultimate 64-bit -- Other Software: Autodesk Inventor 2009 Series