Help me find the broken part.

[Chan]

So my main comp has decided to go on strike, heres what happened:

Past few weeks have noticed occasional freeze/lockup, not very many but noticable due to never doing it before.
On sunday after afew hours of being fine I went to load a game and the comp froze up, I hit restart button and it just hung on windows loading screen. After many many reboot attempts it did finally load into windows but everything was VERY sluggish and it took 2-3 hours to copy some files (about 5 gig) from my system HD to my backup HD.

I assumed it must have been a windows death, but to double check I unplugged/replugged all the HDs/Memory and it still wouldn't load windows so I did a reformat/reinstall. It ran fine all yesterday and was looking like it was windows, but then today after I installed a 16gig game I tried to run defrag to clean up the install and it took 2+ hours to get to 10% at which point I hit the restart button and now its back to hanging on the windows loading screen.

Only other thing I've noticed is it is pausing (2-3) secs on the "Verifying DMI Pool Data..." post screen, wheras before it always flew straight by it. I ran memtest for 2-passes but had to stop it but I'll let it run for all the tests tomorrow. The parts invovled are:

Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4 mobo
Crucial 4GB (2X2GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 Ballistix Memory
AMD Phenom II X3 720 2.8GHz
WD 320G SataII 16MB Cache

Unfortunetly I don't have any other DDR2 memory to try in the system to rule it out right away, since it seems kinda memory-ish failure and reading some reviews on the crucial ballistix page theres people saying thiers failed around 6months and this is now 5-6 months old.

If anyone has any suggestions/tests to run please reply so I can figure wtf is wrong and get stuff RMA'd asap.

*edit - Seems I've fixed the problem, must have been the onboard LAN conflicting with something when I changed some settings, after downloading the newest drivers for it + resetting it to defaults windows now loads/runs as quick as ever.

[CyberChris]

Have a look here.. http://www.duxcw.com/faq/computer/dmi.html it is a little old but good advice.

[Chan]

Ok so update, downloaded ultimatebootcd and went through the tests today.

memtest86 -2 passes no errors
memtest86+ -2 passes no errors
windows memory diag -6/6 passes no errors

WD Datalife guard diag - Quick test no errors / Extended test no errors

CPUstress test - left it upto 1850000 iterations without error

But it still wouldn't load up (checked just in case). So then I went with the DMI thing and reset CMOS, still wouldn't load. I then changed both RAM from dimm1-2 to dimm3-4, swapped the sata cable on the HD and plugged into a different socket. Now windows will load, its still more sluggish than before (10secs or so on the loading screen), and I tested moving some data around and it's taking ~35-45s to move ~2gig files which seems longer than usual.

Not holding much hope that it'll keep working though given it worked for 1 day after resetting everything previously. But now this leaves me ???? about what the problem is and how to fix it, assuming it stops working again the only thing left is the motherboard... not exactly straight forward to test.

Edit - Well still working thus far, I think it may have actually been the on-board network card, I remember changing some tcp settings just before all my problems began... may have caused conflicts or something?