Crashes during gameplay

[Wedge]

Hi Guys. I'm new to his forum, and pc tinkering, and was wondering if I could gather some opinions. At the moment I'm having a slight problem with my PC. It keeps crashing after 5 minutes of gameplay. It either goes back to the desktop or I get a BSOD saying PAGE FAULT IN NON PAGED AREA. I suspect this is faulty Ram. To correct the problem I have tried updating all my drivers, disabling my PCI cards and runnning DxDiag to no avail. Other strange events on my computer are:
1. I got the same BSOD when recently formatting my hard drive and installing xp,
2.When booting the computer from the hard drive I get a message saying that it is an invalid system disk.
3. When i insert the windows disk xp starts fine although i do have to get a screen asking me to choose between windows xp and microsoft windows.
4. when i removed my redundant modem the nothing happened when I switched the power on. When I put it back in the computer started.

I thought I'd get your opinions before investing in some new RAM. Any help greatly appreciated.

[mike_w]

To test the RAM you could use memtest.

[Wedge]

Oops, sorry forgot to mention I started metest and left it running for a while. When i returned the computer had crashed, no BSOD, and was back at my invalid system disk screen. I ran a docmemory quicktest and it found no flaws. I'm going to rerun metest now.

[Korky]

I think u got some really kegged ram, can u give us some details about ur hardware (ram etc)

[Wedge]

Thanks for the responses guys. I've got a cheap system I bought online a year and a half ago (just about to set up new case though). It's got:

motherboard:lex mainboard bn791(onboard sound)
CPU: AMD xp2000+
Memory: two sticks of 256MB 266DDR RAM
gpu: Geforce 4 mx440 (9800pro in the post)
realtek network card, firewire card, modem,

Looking at the memtest results i'm getting a lot of lines with the result as random eg.

"Memory Thread 1 Pass 24 Pattern:random"

I take it this means there's a fault? The random crashes started a few months ago.

[john-boi]

Thanks for the responses guys. I've got a cheap system I bought online a year and a half ago (just about to set up new case though). It's got:

motherboard:lex mainboard bn791(onboard sound)
CPU: AMD xp2000+
Memory: two sticks of 256MB 266DDR RAM
gpu: Geforce 4 mx440 (9800pro in the post)
realtek network card, firewire card, modem,

Looking at the memtest results i'm getting a lot of lines with the result as random eg.

"Memory Thread 1 Pass 24 Pattern:random"

I take it this means there's a fault? The random crashes started a few months ago.

No the random is the pattern the memory test is throwing at your RAM.You should see somewhere the number of passes passed and passes failed.If you have all sucessful passes after around a couple of hours you can say your RAM is ok.Some people run the test over night but a couple of hours is usually sufficient