@Jack - I'll have a go with that - thanks for the tip
@Charlie - yep, this machine has been nothing but trouble since day 1. I said in another thread that this will be the last pc I ever buy from this particular vendor. Their quality control has down downhill a lot since 2007. I'll build my own in future.

 As far as the data, I think you will be OK, once the old card and driver are gone. Chances are if you boot up in safe mode and uninstall the video card driver, you will have access to your data but the screen may be a lower resolution and no HW acceleration.

Well, it's all boxed up & ready to be picked up on Monday.

I fired up my old XP32 box, just to have a look, and there is no way on this earth I could ever revert to 32 bit or XP!

There were a few old plugs i wanted the dlls for, so I copied those across to my External.

So I now have a quad core Q6700 with 4Gb of RAM doing nothing.

Think I'll wipe it, re-install Windows and see if anyone round here wants a pretty good machine by way of introduction into home recording.

Update - computer has been fitted with a new graphics card, stress tested, and is awaiting collection from my wife's office.

They also fitted my hard drives with silencers.

Can't wait to get it home!

That sounds like some good progress.  I hope it all works out. 

Thanks Jan. I am cautiously optimistic.

can your psu take the strain, is another area you might need to look into.. I mean did you add anything more to drain a bit more power? iffy drivers etc etc. eliminate anything you updated recently also.   

sure you will sort it.. but I have a c64 here.. 30 year old.. and never an issue .. decent sound chip in it also ;-)

Hi Paul.

This was a new build last year, built by an audio specialist company who I've used before.

Strangely enough, since I  took delivery of this machine, they have had to replace:

All the memory
Graphics card
PSU

And only now have they finally installed hard rive silencers.


The machine seems to be running perfectly again, but this was the case 3 weeks ago when it just died without warning.