Since I put it together, this PC has been pretty frequently crashing to BSOD... at the time I was so fed up of having to RMA components I just put up with it, but now I want to fix it, even if I have to pay a load of money to do it! Some days it crashes several times, then other times it seems to stay stable for a week. The last three BSOD codes looked like this SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION 1 - *** STOP: 0x0000003B (0x00000000C0000005,0xFFFFF80001ECE3BC,0xFFFFFA6008C52360,0x0000000000000000) 2 - *** STOP: 0x0000003B (0x00000000C0000005,0xFFFFF80001ED5745,0xFFFFFA600A6A2C40,0x0000000000000000) 3 - *** STOP: 0x0000003B (0x00000000C0000005,0xFFFFF80001EC9DBA,0xFFFFFA6009FE0980,0x0000000000000000) But I have absolutely no idea what any of it means! Here's the system spec Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Asus P5Q WS 4 x 2 GB DDR2-800 DDR2 SDRAM (6-6-6-18 @ 400 MHz) (8192MB) NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra (768 MB) SAMSUNG HD501LJ ATA Device (500 GB, 7200 RPM, SATA-II) Asus Xonar D2X soundcard Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit Anyone able to help me wins some virtual cheesecake!
Well for a start, what insanely loose timings your ram is running at. I guess that is to do with the 2gb and possible quite old sticks. Is anything overclocked? Have you made sure you updated the drivers for everything? Reseated heatsink for cpu, and graphics card if its an aftermarket cooler. Might still be worth a check even if its stock. Have you checked your temps? You might try running something like intel burn test and see if that causes a crash, the chances then are that its cpu or ram related. You could also try memtest on your ram. And rthdribl to stress your graphics card. Install rivatuner to check the temp of your card while you are running rthdribl. I usually use hwmonitor to see the temps of anything it detects, it may not be the most accurate for all systems but it will enable you to see if anything is really heating up under different types of load.
From what I can gather it's either a memory problem, which means one-at-a-time testing(give the slots a little blow out as well just in case dust is shorting them) or it's a printer incompatibility problem.
I'm pretty sure all the cooling is fine - I monitor the temps with Everest. I'll give testing the memory a go.
Just having come from some BSOD problems myself, I found the following website which I thought was invaluable. Of particular use was the suggestion to use WinDebug with starters guide here (last two links are off the BSOD guide under "How to Debug Memory Dumps" and included here just for reference) I can't stress how much easier this made the whole issue. After starting to use WinDbg I traced the issue back to ATI CCC in seconds (it mentioned it in the output of WinDbg crash report) - I wouldn't have had a clue otherwise as I thought it was probably a hardware problem to do with cooling as well. If you do suspect memory then I would try the vista memory test mentioned in the original article as well.
I tried that debugging software, and it suggested the fault was windows itself, so I reinstalled... so far no crashes! I was so convinced it was a hardware fault I didn't even bother trying that before
You shouldn't have to reinstall as Vista has a repair option on the installation disk. It saves losing all the installed programs and works quite well to boot.
