Rant - why is my doing this to me?!! Please help me id the problem?

[eUphoria]

Well, where to start... ASUS A8N mobo, S939 with an x2 4200 @2.4GHz, 2Gb crucial ballistix, corsair 520watt PSU, water cooled, 7800GT. Running vista

Im getting lots of random freezes, not uncommon BSOD and a few days ago a refusal to boot to windows - that endless cycle of boot, start to loads windows - reboot etc etc etc, and nothing i could do would let me into windows. Drives me nuts!!! I wondered about memory problems so have run a couple of mem checkers and drawn a blank.

Was running an opty146 @ 2.8GHz no problems in XP with 2x512 geil ram. Then changed the OS, the CPU and the RAM at the same time. The cpu was brand new, the memory from a forum member on here. Since then the problems have been occurring, unusual to get problems once the pc is actually in windows however.

Now it seems to me that the finger of blame falls on buying dodgy second hand ram? any other possibilities people???

[Zak33]

have you got another hard drive to try installing an OS on? it might be your hard drive.

Have you run Memtest then? Cos if you have, and it's showing ok then it IS ok....cos Memtest is very very reliable.

[eUphoria]

have you got another hard drive to try installing an OS on? it might be your hard drive.

Have you run Memtest then? Cos if you have, and it's showing ok then it IS ok....cos Memtest is very very reliable.

Thanks for the quick reply Zak - i've changed the HDD too with no change to the problems. I'm not sure if i've run memtest - i think just the MS mem tester, i'll try that one - thanks

[eUphoria]

Heres the blue screen im getting:



did a google search and pulled up this

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939720

could it be gpu related? doesnt vista like my gpu and its nothing to do with memory or cpu at all??

[arthurleung]

That looks like CPU/Mem error to me.
Try SP2004? Try run it for 12 hours and see how far it would run before showing "Failed" or reboot itself?

Is your 2GB 4x512 or 2x1G? Asus A8N(-SLI Deluxe) was very dodgy with 4 sticks of ram in my past experience.

unusual to get problems once the pc is actually in windows however.

Would suggest it is CPU-related because once you get into windows the CPU is mostly idle and you would probably see programs crashing rather than windows itself.

[0iD]

I'd put cash on it being memory related.

[Ferral]

You could try manually setting the pagefile on the hard disc instead of letting Windows decide on the size. Bit unsure on how to do this under Vista however.

I would try setting it to around 1Gb in size and see what happens then.

Also try the usual things like removing all ram and then putting them in 1 at a time to see if it is one particular stick causing the problem. Make sure that the cooler on CPU is seated properly. Make sure there are no IRQ conflicts within Windows, if there are change IRQ's at a bios level.

Make sure all the ram is the same speed, if one isn't then all will need dropping down to that ones speed. You could also try putting the hard disc on a different port on the board (are you using IDE? ). Have nothing slaved to it also if it is IDE.

Few things to try out and let me know how you get on.

[eUphoria]

Thanks for the advice guys - HDD is 500gb SATA II on SATA 1. IDE primary is a DVD drive. Both mem sticks are a matched pair of ballistix (2x1gb). I agree about mem defect - its what i was concerned could be the problem. I've just updated vista and installed the hotfix and although this is only boot number 1 since restart i didnt get any problems - am i just being too hopeful that it was such a simple fix? Probably. Guess i'll have to have a proper investigate of teh memory though...

edit - and cpu is watercooled, block looks to be seated well and temps are low.