One. I put in a new CR2032 CMOS battery.
Optiplex 330: has motherboard integrated VGA and
motherboard has PCI-E X16 slot. I insert PCI-E X16 new graphics card onto 330's motherboard.
Power supply is 600 watt, graphics card wants 300 watts, power ok.
Format 1TB hard drive and start fresh, new install of Windows 7 64-bit.
I install Windows up till SP1 and another 215 official Windows updates.
All this time the monitor is 100% and is inserted into the X16 graphics card.
Then, after hours of working, I get the blue screen with the error message
NMI: Parity Check / Memory Parity Error and upon rebooting
Only 2 and 4 light up on the front panel.
I remove the PCI-E X16 graphics card, allowing the system to default to the VGA attached to the motherboard,
Still the exact error message with 2 and 4 active.
No ways is there memory problems with the motherboard's VGA since it only shares RAM, no "personal"
memory. If RAM cards were faulty, problems would have occurred earlier.
Ok, I can remove the hard drive, reformat and reinsert and try again with the new battery in place from the start.
ISSUE: Optiplex 330 is only provided Dell drivers until Windows XP. No official, tested Windows 7 drivers - that is the web page within Dell for Optiplex 330.
DO I FALL BACK TO WINDOWS XP?
The advantage is use official Dell drivers allocated to my servive tag.
Whatever Operating Sytem I decide on, I install the official NVIDIA driver quickly, not allowing any Windows
automatic selection of graphics driver since I read that many with this specific error fixed it with drivers.
Is Windows 7 actually Ok with my fault being not quickly overriding Windows 7's graphics driver with the exact, official NVIDIA card's driver?????
Second fault was installing Windows 7 with a 2 volt (dead) battery. Funny enough the dead battery appeared to
not give problems....... Perhaps it retaliated!!!
Thanks for any suggestions.