Hiya there, I have a momentous problem with my PC that has me and virtually everyone else I know stumped.

3 months ago I bought a new PC with this spec:

Athlon 3200+ XP
MSI K7N2 Motherboard with Nforce2 chipset
1024 MB of Kingston DDR 400mhz valueRAM
Geforce fx 5700 Ultra 128mb
Hitachi 40GB HDD
300W PSU
Windows XP Home

Ever since I got it, I have experienced crashes - both blue screens of death, and crashes to desktop - sometimes they come up with an error, sometimes not. I only get these crashes when I play computer games such as Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes or run 3DMark in Demo mode. I have done everything I can imagine to sort this problem, including:

Reinstalled games
Reinstalled windows
Re-formatted my hard drive
Virus scanned - no viruses found, and have decent anti-virus and firewall
Installed uber fans - both CPU fans and exhaust fans - CPU runs at a max of 46 degrees C.
Upgraded all drivers
Rolled drivers back
Changed sound card
Switched gfx card from Geforce fx 5700 Ultra to Radeon 9500 pro
Changed BIOS settings to remove high end settings
Tested my memory with Memtest 86 and found no errors
Run Dxdiag and found no errors
Played with DirectX 8 and 9.

Is there anything else I can try, or is the most likely thing to be a hardware fault? When I get a BSOD I get various stop errors - I regularly get 0x08E quoting the nv4_disp.dll as being the problem, but I have followed the directions on the MS website and reinstalled drivers as they said to no avail. When I tried it with the Radeon card I didn't get any BSOD, but I did still crash to desktop - I don't know if I wouldn't have got a BSOD at all as I only used the Radeon card for 6 hours and I can sometimes go for 2 days without a BSOD crash. I have tried running on different memory sticks (using one stick in one of the three slots to see if one of the sticks/slots was faulty) and I still crashed to desktop.

forums.freddyshouse.com is another thread where I have tried to get help but come up with nothing - might answer some questions

Please help me as I'm going out of my head with this

It sounds like a very common problem, though the reasons can be many.

I would check the following:

- Hardware conflicts (usually between NIC, sound card and video card)
- Overheated chipset. Get a utility like AIDA32 to see how hot it is - I had a problem with an overheated chipset until I got a Blue Orb chipset heatsink and fan. Open up the case if needed (check first if that voids your warranty).
- AIDA32 can also tell you how close to specs your psu might be running - check the voltages from the sensor screen. It could be that 300W is not enough juice.
- Have you ever had the problem when not playing games? Even with system intensive applications like CD/DVD burning?

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I have no hardware conflicts.

I have a very nice heatsink and fan on my CPU - aero7 that has significantly cooled the CPU down (I put this in about a month ago) and have not noticed a decrease in BSODs. According to AIDA32 my CPU temperature is at 63degrees C, however PC Alert says it is running at 53 degrees - not sure why there's a discrepancy and not sure which one to trust. Both say that the motherboard temp is 49 degrees. (These temperatures are taken on a hot day while running several applications including a high end game, and are at the high end.)

As for my power usage, I'm not sure about the variance I should get, but none of it is greater than about 5%, and this is while running the same applications as previously. However they're all a little under par - the 12V comes out at 11.45V, the 5V at 4.85V and the 3.3V at 3.20V.

As for the problem when not playing games, I only really use the computer for that - I don't have a CD burner on it so can't test that I'm afraid. I occasionally get internet explorer crashing to desktop, or iTunes, but very rarely, and don't have any BSODs unless playing games.

The stop messages I get on the BSOD include the stop 0x0000050 one (paged fault in non-paged area) 0x0000000A (IRQL not less or equal) and 0x0000008E quoting nv4_disp.dll (my gfx card driver) as the problem. I've followed the MS instructions on how to fix it to no avail - both before and after formatting my hard drive. If the drivers are corrupt or outdated, then it must be at the nVidia end as I have tried many times to reinstall/uninstall/roll back my drivers with no success (making sure of course that the old drivers are properly removed every time).

Also I dont' know if this is relevant, but also when I get a BSOD my monitor refresh rate resets to 60hz after rebooting.

I think your motherboard temp is pretty high...mine sits at 24C for normal operation but I am blowing a lot of air through it. My Athlon 1200 also idles at around 41C. The Athlon 3200+ XP should operate in the 39-43C range. Its not overclocked right?

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Hello Naetha,

I'd have to agree with Div that this is most likely a heat-related issue. I recall, not so long ago that I had similar symptoms, i.e. frequent spate of unexpected BSODs on my Windows ME setup.

In the end, it was simply a matter of cleaning the fans (a lot of dust had built-up) and PC's temp was running abnormally high (>50C). There's even an old thread around here somewhere where I discussed this issue...

Nowadays, I clean the insides of my computer at least once every 6 months (especially the fans) and I am happy to say I've not seen a single BSOD since!

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I'm 95% certain its not overheating causing these BSODs as the stop messages that come up never imply that this is the case. I also know that my system runs pretty cool for one of its type, and that even when I reduced the temp by 10 degrees, the BSODs did not reduce in their frequency. As for the state of my computer's innards - I haven't had it very long (3 months) and it's hardly dusty at all.

I got an interesting BSOD stop error today though which I don't remember having seen previously - it quoted stop 0x0000007F which I chased up on the MS website and apparently it implies that there could be a hardware fault, either with the memory or motherboard - I guess I'll just have to send it back and hope they find the problem and don't charge me daft amounts for wasting their time

Tell me one time Microsoft's errors messages ever mean what they say

Nevermind, sounds like the only wise thing to do now is exactly what you plan to do next... sending it in for a check-up. Let us know what you find out...

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After TONS of searching I finally figured out the problem. I was having the same blue screen of death dealing with a "bad driver" or "bad graphics driver" or "IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL_TO" or some other BSOD that I can't remember.

First I tried re-installing XP Pro and downloading ALL updates. No luck.

I then replaced my Radeon 9600 256MB with a new Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB and replaced my 1GB of memory for some new Kingston Memory. Re-installed Windows again and got all updates. Still no luck. I even tried updating the BIOS to the latest version. :-x

CPU was running cool and system was fairly new. I was down to either the CPU or processor.

My specs are:

AMD Athlon 2600+
MSI K7N2 Motherboard with Nforce2 chipset
1024 MB of Kingston DDR 400mhz valueRAM in dual channel mode
Radeon 9800 Pro
2 Western Digital Raptor SATA drives in RAID array
350W power supply
Windows XP Pro

I even set the BIOS to run in safe mode. Finally, I tried one last thing:

I removed my memory chips and placed them in the first two purple slots, which means they are now running in single channel mode, opposed to dual channel.

OMG!!! That worked! I couldn't believe it, but my computer has been running non-stop for almost 2 weeks now, except for the ONE time I had to re-start due to a Windows Update. :-o

This post caught my attention because the guy had the same motherboard as me. I have since bought another motherboard (same model) and hopefully I will have time this weekend to install the replacement motherboard and put my memory back in dual channel mode.

We'll see what happens. Maybe the motherboard was bad, or maybe the motherboard just doesn't take the dual channel memory well. Hopefully it's the first one.

I have seen a few posts on other sites that indicate MSI has some quality control issues. I personally put a system together for a neighbor who bought an MSI board and I couldn't install Windows. The board refused to see the CD drive. I tried everything I could think of including scouring the 'net for 2 days. I finally told him I suspected a bad mobo/CD drive (it was an MSI drive also). He took the mobo and drive back for a refund and bought ASUS components. Booted and installed w/ absolutely no problems.

For the most part, the boards I looked at raved about MSI (mostly cuz they're cheap) but a few people griped about the same problem I had. Apparently MSI mobo's have a tendency to have bad buses, usually w/ the IDE controllers.

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Now here’s the puzzler, I found out what was causing the problem – it was nothing more complex than my KVM switch causing problems. I took out the KVM switch, and all the problems stopped – I don’t think I’ve crashed since. BUT – my husband bought a computer with a similar spec, but slightly different components, and now he’s having exactly the same problems. He isn’t using the KVM switch, has an Athlon 64 3200, 762MB of Novatech RAM, a Novatech motherboard, Geforce 4 Ti 4600, yet is getting exactly the same error messages as I got. We’re completely stumped. We shared/switched components for the first couple of weeks until we had both our systems optimised, but now we’re back to using the original components that came with his system. We’ve done the same things as I did – formatted the hard drive, reinstalled games, Windows, run virus scans, etc etc. We can’t figure out for the life of us what’s wrong. Any ideas?