hi there everyone
its been a while since i last posted, so excuse my "rubbish" style! LOL
anyway i recently upgraded to win xp YUK! :-x because of various errors in win 2k. i been using win 2k for few years, but am fed up with the odd error i kept getting that i have been unable to fix -
basically what used to happen was that randomly out of the blue i would get a blue screen of death, cant rember quite what it said, but basically it pointed to faulty ram. i have 2 different memory testers (one that tests th pc befopre booting to windows) the other that tests memory usage while ur pc is in use. neither can find any errors! anyway sometimes when the BSOD comes up it corrupts my file system, ie cannot find NTFS or some other annnoying irrepariable error - resulting in a reformt, lots of swearing and a lack of sleep while i speond 36 hours getting th pc back up and running and everything fixed.
so i bought new ram, new HD, etc etc. the only things i havent upgraded are CPU, MB, graphics card and sound card.
now i have upgraded to win xp. :-(
i have had the same error 2 or 3 times in the last 3 months or so - but this time the pc boots up ok, and win xp says it has recovered from serious error and shoulkd send error report. fingers crossed all is ok if i get th BSOD win xp seems to not corrupt itself and i simply restart pc. but im just waiting for it to f**k itself over again and corrupt its file system. anyone ever had errors like this or no wehat causes them???
HOOD

PS i used to play NFS underground on win 2k - it instal direct x 9, all fine. but yesterday i instaled it on xp and it brought the error (memroy bollox) BSOD up everytime it got to 100% instaling (i tried it 3 times). any idea about that? it says it compatible with xp!!! very annoying as i was 88 level complete out of 144 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i will get more technical info about the BSOD error next time i get it! (so hopefully i wont post again on this thread!)

Hi Hood.

Unfortunately this could be any type of hardware problem. As far as I am concerned, Microsoft has really come a long way with random crashes in both 2K and XP. If you are getting BSOD in these, it is most certainly your hardware.

Do you have anything in particular that you are doing prior to getting BSOD's? This can be an indication of what is failing sometimes. Also, the error code may help to determine what it is, but most likely not.

Besides memory (which it sounds like you have already eliminated), the most common hardware error in my experience is the MB. What MB do you have? Have you looked to see if there is any history of hardware problems with it?

After that, the CPU may be causing problems. Does it crash under heavy processor loads? I had a fan go out the other day, that I thought I caught in time. Unfortunately something got fried in my CPU and under heavy loads the entire system would hang (this is under Linux, not Windows).

Anyway, if you have any more pertinent information let us know. The MB is a pain to change out, but if you have an extra laying around, you may want to give it a whirl.

ok, so i just installed colin mcrae rally 04 - i cant play NFS so i can at least drive cars at stupid speed on this game, right?! but no - same error, just after instaling i double click the exe to load game - and BSOD appears. it says:

STOP
0X0000008E
(0XC0000005, 0X0000020E, 0XB0A6CC8, 0X00000000)

BEGINNING DUMP OF PHYSICAL MEMORY
PHYSICAL MEMORY DUMP COMPLETE

or something like that + or minus the odd zero!


now presumably when i load the game it tries to load a "bad" bit or ram... but as i already said i have tested ram. can anyone point me to more ram testers to check this again, or explain why i should get this error..

could it be caused by direct x 9? anyone had problems like this because of direct x? is it a valid idea even?
cheers for any help guys

PS - thank god pc is ok, but im not, every time i get BSOD i get heart attack cause i no its only matter of time b4 it kills my pc and its a reformat job!!!


i suppose an easy sollution - is dont play games, as games sem to set it off 80 percent of time, the other 20% are purely random!!!!!!!!

Everywhere I read, this points to a memory error still. You may want to play around with the memory settings in your BIOS as well. Try to be real conservative in your settings and see if this makes any difference.

I still hold out that a MB could be the cause as well. Perhaps a connector is faulty?

well i have 3 sticks of 512 mb ram, to make 1.5 gb ram in total. i thought maybe one bit was faulty, even though m,y ram testers test them ok (can anyone point me to a good memory tester they know works?). i have two made by crucil one made by "matrix", so i taken the cheap matrix piece out, and all been fine for about 2 weeks. but then today during copying a dvd, surfing net, copying files from an external hard drive and downloading using bit torrent i came up with following error:

driver_irql_not_less_or_equal

-----------------------------

ousbehci.sys

address f7b7a22a base at f7b76000 date stamp 3c594614




obviously due to the ammount i was sing the pc for the pc was maxing its cpu, and was using a lot of memory. i have reason to believ it could be cpu problem (but i had it for 2.5 yrs with no problem) - same goes for MB. so im stil back to th fact it cud b memory problem..,, even tho i taken one out. but the above error doesnt mention memory. anyone got any ideas?

i googled it and most other people seem to point to memroy with this problem.

cheers

hi again
just had another error, but i think this was caused by a driver not memory - cud b wrong


it said


caused by ati2dvag
beginning dump of physical memory

so does this mean that the ati (graphics card) driver used part of a bad memory sector? or its memory only at fault. or only driver at fault? does this info help anyone solve my problem?

cheers