silentsammy
Limp Gawd
- Joined
- Feb 4, 2006
- Messages
- 342
I've been getting random system lockups and the occasional blue screen on my desktop system (see sig). Typically the system will lock when i stress it out by playing a game such as Left4Dead, but it can also randomly happen when I'm doing relatively simple things in windows such as a java applet.
In Left4Dead the system will usually have a few little half second stutters, almost like it freezes for a split second. It will do this a few times over the course of 30 seconds then it will just freeze...i have to hard boot to get out of this freeze. When i do hardboot I notice that it sometimes will get stuck on the 'checking IDE channels' on initial boot screen or on the 'verifying DMI'. If i turn off the system for 20 seconds or so that seems to clear the boot-sequence issue and it will load vista again.
I was unfortunatley unable to get all the info from the occasional BSOD screen i had except for it saying something like 'driver_irq_not_less_or_equal'.
THINGS I'VE DONE SO FAR THAT HAD NO EFFECT:
- installed new nvidia drivers for my vid card (evga 8800 gtx)
- reinstalled drivers for my soundcard (X-FI xtremegamer) and creative alchemy
RAN A MEMORY TEST WITH MEMTEST86 in DOS MODE:
- this did one complete pass without errors but I left it running overnight and in the morning i found that the screen had gone completely corrupt... it looked like a all fuzzy wavy lines all over the screen. I hit escape and it rebooted itself (i believe this is normal for memtest86 so it was still running in background even with the video distortion)
I don't know a lot about memory testing but is this video corruption that i'm getting during the memtest indicative of a RAM failure or would it be more likely a video card issue or something else?
Thanks in advance for any advice!
In Left4Dead the system will usually have a few little half second stutters, almost like it freezes for a split second. It will do this a few times over the course of 30 seconds then it will just freeze...i have to hard boot to get out of this freeze. When i do hardboot I notice that it sometimes will get stuck on the 'checking IDE channels' on initial boot screen or on the 'verifying DMI'. If i turn off the system for 20 seconds or so that seems to clear the boot-sequence issue and it will load vista again.
I was unfortunatley unable to get all the info from the occasional BSOD screen i had except for it saying something like 'driver_irq_not_less_or_equal'.
THINGS I'VE DONE SO FAR THAT HAD NO EFFECT:
- installed new nvidia drivers for my vid card (evga 8800 gtx)
- reinstalled drivers for my soundcard (X-FI xtremegamer) and creative alchemy
RAN A MEMORY TEST WITH MEMTEST86 in DOS MODE:
- this did one complete pass without errors but I left it running overnight and in the morning i found that the screen had gone completely corrupt... it looked like a all fuzzy wavy lines all over the screen. I hit escape and it rebooted itself (i believe this is normal for memtest86 so it was still running in background even with the video distortion)
I don't know a lot about memory testing but is this video corruption that i'm getting during the memtest indicative of a RAM failure or would it be more likely a video card issue or something else?
Thanks in advance for any advice!