First off, some specs, all parts currently @ stock: Athlon XP 2500+ Gigabyte GA-7n400 Pro 2 Revision 2 Aspire 550W PSU Hitachi 60GB UATA Boot Drive Maxtor 200GB UATA Storage Drive BFG 6600GT OC AOpen Cobra A850 Sound Card 1GB Mushkin Basic Green PC3200 DDR RAM Now, normally, for quite some time, my comp has run like a champ, no serious issues for a very good while on this box. About two/three days ago, I reformatted/reinstalled WinXP because the ol' boy was running a bit sluggish. Up until appearently just now everything had been running fine. I had fully updated my Windows with all the hardware/critical patches, got myself updated PC Cillin and Webroot Spysweeper, and was cooking along at a nice pace. Now today, when I come home from work, I find that I've got a blank screen and no picture, even when trying to 'wake up' the box. So I shut the machine down with the power button, give it a minute, and start it back up. Bam, just like magic. So I go off surfing he net for about an hour and a half or so, and then all of a sudden, it freezes up completely. I was thoroughly confused, so I restarted and attempted to boot again. I'm met, about halfway through the XP bootscreen, with a BSOD that's gone so quickly I can't read what it's caused by. Booting Last Known & Starting Windows normally both cause this, and any safe mode options just result in a quick scroll of loaded files before a freeze+reboot. I checked the BIOS for temps, and while they are about 4-5 degrees above normal, they're still in a good average range. 33 C, just about. So now, I'm confused, having checked all the connections and having no positive outcome, I'm on my roomates laptop while I'm giving the machine a while powered down to see if that solves the problem. Meanwhile, does anyone else have any ideas?
If it was after a reinstall to me it implies theres something up with your install. Either that or a piece of hardware has gone down. (Its happened to me before, had a spare box for emergencies, everything worked fine on it, reinstalled windows, a day later m/b died on me) Since you said that you had just reinstalled windows I'm assuming you will have recently backed up. Heres what I would do... 1) Strip machine down to bare minimum, including sound, diasable firewire, network etc etc one hd and one cd device. 2) Reinstall windows. 3) sp2 (if your windows CD has it built in dont bother.) 4) chipset drivers 5) enable network card, install driver, run windows update 6) Vga drivers 7) Direct x 8) One by one enable each piece of hardware, and install the required drivers, remembering to reboot between each. This is generally how I install windows on a machine, and have found it generally gives me a stable system, and if there is an offending piece of hardware because I installed them one by one I can usually find the suspect. GL Nims
nimbu's advice is what I would recommend first, but if there's an underlying hardware issue then you might want to perform some low-level diagnostics. Run memtest (Google it if you aren't sure what it is) for a few hours. If it finds errors, remove a single stick of RAM (I assume you have two) and try again. If it still faults, then swap the sticks round. The most sure-fire way to find hardware faults is by elimination It sounds like memory or power to me at the moment. While the power supply isn't from one of the main manufacturers, I'd try the RAM first.
Well, after only about an hour of memtest, I had 16 errors. I decided to stop it for a moment and try out switching the sticks to see if one was bad. I tried both sticks individually, and in multiple channels each, all to the same (I assume) BSOD result. EDIT: When my roommate wakes up, I'm gonna try his Hard Drive out in my machine to see if it's possibly my HDD crashing, though I don't know how likely that is, that would probably be the cheapest fix.
16 errors in one hour is sixteen errors too many. If you get problems with both sticks, then I'd be inclined to think it was a motherboard fault. Are all the timings set to the manufacturer's rated specs? What's the RAM voltage? You might want to bump that up a notch
Yep, I haven't touched a thing as far as timings or voltage so far. Interesting thing happened just a moment ago, I tried to boot it up for another round of memtest, only to get a quick reboot loop accompanied by a loud, long beep each time. EDIT: Swapped for a new PSU, no dice. Upped DIMM voltage, nada. I'm getting worried that it's going to end up being a motherboard problem, because that's something I just don't want to have to deal with... Still waiting for my roomie to wake up so I can try his HDD, and hopefully that'll be the case, because if not that, then the options for what's causing the problem are quickly shrinking.
Try setting all the RAM-related timings etc. to Auto. If that won't play, then raise the RAM voltage a notch to 2.6 or so. However, if both have suddenly gone bad, then I'd accuse the motherboard. Do you have any other RAM to test it with?
I do, but again, not until the roomate gets up. He just got his new setup in the mail yesterday, so he's going to set this one, the one I'm currently typing from, aside and build his new one up, so I should probably be able to borrow some parts for the moment. I'll check and see if everything is auto, and possibly up the voltage once more, in just a moment, I've been fiddling with this thing all morning and I need a frustration break.
