This has been an ongoing problem for a while now, i come to you wise bit-techers having reached the point of not knowing how what to do next. I'll use steam as an example, when i download a game on steam, it quite often wont boot or crashes mid game. When i run the check integrity of game cache option if find that the whole game is not there and steam needs to download an "update". It doesnt matter how many times i do this the full game is never there, however when i do carry this out i tend to get longer in game and it is more stable. The same thing happens with torrents, i have to run the hash re-check and then the rest of the file downloads but i can never get the file to 100%. Also i had been experiencing random blue screens and when i start my pc up it often runs check disk and finds corrupt files. What i have done: Put all overclocks back to stock, didnt help First of all i thought this was an OS issue so i reinstalled windows (the installation was getting incredibly slow anyway). Although this seems to have cleared up the blue screen issue but when i tried steam, same problem. so i thought it could be an issue with the ethernet port, the wire is in a position where it can be pulled (ive fixed this now), but when i tried steam using a wireless card it had exactly the same effect. The only thing i can think of now is a hard drive issue, the HDD is no more than 9 months old and all the smart values are fine. im really stuck here so any suggestions are welcome. Im running XP pro
Advice I think that its eaither you HardDirve has to much room or that your WIndow XP Pro computer is old i have the same problem once for instance my old computer is also Window XP pro and i have alot of stuff in it like C.S,Halo Trial,Perfect World,and other things that has to deal with games due to everything i have in my computer it wont run new games very well for example one of the problem was trying to install my C&C Generals Zero Hour game when i was trying to Install it the game wont go to 100% plus it only saves parts of the Folders therefore i believe that your computer is full of Memories/Its to old i could be wrong but this is my Point Of View..
This sounds deceptively like either a HDD (yes, even a 9 month "young") or a RAM issue. If I had to pick one of the two I'd bet on a RAM issue, though.
ive run a few passes of memtest with no problems, i seem to have a habit for acquiring very difficult to diagnose hardware problems
I was going to say that i was experiening a simliar problem, where the downloads would never complete but i fixed by changing my wireless encryption on my router so maybe kenco could be right.
ok so the blue screens have returned, this time happening when i am checking the game cache in steam, starting to look more and more like a hdd issue
I vaguely remember something like this being related to a problem with the nvidia chipset driver firewall (or something like that)...
The nForce4 chipset has some data corruption issues (hey, it's from nVidia! ) when used in connection with the built-in hardware firewall. There's a driver to circumvent that, though. The driver isn't publicly available, but I have it. Just in case anyone needs it.
In the case of the nVidia firewall it's crucial to just not install the drivers/apps for it so it only has networking drivers and not firewall drivers. But as your signature says: I reckon you're NOT using an nForce4 chipset But honestly... I think your HDD is dying. Try a reinstall on another HDD and see if things don't suddenly clear up. If not then there's a really remote chance that you've crisped something on the overclocking. Then you're suddenly looking at searching for errors on your motherboard (might be the hdd controller) and it could be a looong search.
