I have an ASUS A7M266 motherboard with 266 FSB and an Athlon 1.33 processor. I can only run it at 1.00 with FSB speed of 200. If I try to change processor speed to 1.33 in setup it automatically changes other settings to give me 266 FSB. When computer reboots it keeps reinstalling system files to a backup copy...scandisk says it is fixing linked files...and it also tells me I have "error #a9 memory address F000:E14C". I have no clue what any of that means. I do remember when I first got computer some short cuts wouldn't work and I couldn't format HD...had to take it into shop to be fixed and I think they flashed the BIOS. I'm not even sure if I'm posting this in the right spot but any help incuding right place to post this would be appreciated. THNX

SlingShot,
i need to know make and type of RAM you are useing?
i am doing some research on this for you.

Will do...I have some more info to. Ram might be Samsung pc2100 DDR but I really need to open this up to be sure. I'll get to it this weekend. Would do it now but need some sleep before work. Thnx for the help.

i'll wiat to hear from you. have a good weekend.

Going to put some more info here. When I had 98SE and tried to change processor speed it would tell me it couldn't write to the registry and loaded a backup copy of my system files. I ran every test I could find on my components and the one constant was that I had a bad file system. So...every time I ran windows tools to fix file system it was useless because when I changed processor speed the registry would load the backup which windows, and the online hard drive test I ran, said was bad. I also ran scanreg.exe/fix from DOS and it said it repaired c:\windows\system.dat but still had the same problems.
I just loaded XP Pro and did a complete format and went to the ntfs? file system instead of FAT32. Now it tells me it can't find windows\system32\config\system "File Is Missing Or Corrupt". The file is there...I looked .To answer your question I am using Kingston Value Ram "NANYA" KVR266X64C25/256. I am using 2 dimms and have tried using them 1 at a time in both dimm slots to see if maybe it would show one of them was bad. It pretty much made no difference however it did make it to the start of XP Pro screen once before it hung up...usually I dont get past boot page. Very sorry it took me so long to get back. Thnx

can you boot to safe mode?
have you checked the hard drive for problems?
if you set the system up for the cpu to be run at 1.00 does it boot up?

The system has always booted up fine at 1.00 it's only when I try to change to 1.33 that I have problems. Actually I'm on it right now. The only problem I've noticed at 1.00 is sometimes when I save a replay of a first person shooter game I play on the net. When I go back and watch the replay, after the first time a player gets killed they respawn with a different gun than what they were actually using in the game. I know it's this system doing it because it never happens on my other computer. Somehow the replay files are getting corrupted on here. I have ran a couple of hard drive tests on the internet and both said I had a bad file system but the drive was fine. I ran these when I was using 98SE. I haven't done it since I switched to XP Pro. I have also ran online virus scans and everything came up clean. I ran mark7 on here and my processor compression score was around 20%...there were also some othe scores as far as the processor that were around 40%. I don't know enough about a processor to know if it could be causing these problems.