Frequent crashes

DanGerMus

Well for the last day or 2 ive been gettin frequent system crashes.
First i noticed in BF2142 i've tried it a couple(7) of times tonite and i was playing for like 5 mins and boom BSOD.But now i cant even play cos the game locks up upon hitting the join game button. Upon restart i got a windows message suggesting memory test i ran windows memory tester and it showed ok but only ran it like six time apparently you have to leave it run all night.
Any way then i remembered i've definatly had another one in the last few days also today when i came home i had left my pc running last night at about 12 midnight and found today that it had restarted over the night at about 1:40 i know this from checkin Azureus messages and i think the same windows message came up then aswell. a STOP ERROR of some sort. Sounds kinda vague thanks microsoft. Then later tonight out of nowhere it crashed all i was doin was surfing demonoid lookin for downloads when it crashed and nothin was running accept IE7 not even downloading anything.

So heres what i changed on my PC last week

i got 2 new seagate 250 GB Barracuda 7200.10 sata.
i have installed them in RAID0 and i have installed windows XP 64 on them.
I had this system running fine and stable before this on my old WD 250GB drive with XP PRO 32bit. Just wanted to try x64 and RAID in the hopes of better performance. To be honest i have noticed much of an improvement accept when installing programmes that i've downloaded onto the raid set the setup installations run very fast. much faster than the same installations went on old setup. but when it come to just using programmes stuff is much the same as before.

My setup DS3 rev.1, C2D E6700, x1950pro, 2GB GEIL pc 6400.

I'm thinkin my problem might be RAID related seein as it's really the only new thing on the setup. but maybe it's XP64bit anyone know of stability issues with it. I installed it on my GFs PC aswell and it's running smoothly for a few weeks now so i'm thinkin maybe not. any Ideas what i should be lookin at. one more thing i played FEAR last night for an hour and had all settings maxed as much as possible and had no problems with it only quit to go to bed, and cos it's a scary game only got it recently.

To round up BF2142 is deffinatly having problems but i have been having problems other places too and the memory is being blamed for it by windows.

8T8

Well if all that's been upgraded is the HD's to a RAID array have you considered going back to the 32-bit XP

XP 64 isn't really worth it & drivers could be an issue if not the RAM.

Try running Memtest+ for a few hours as well just in case and if it gets the all clear then try 32-bit XP and see if any problems occur after that.

DanGerMus

yeah i think back to xp 32 is best option. i cant see any benefits from 64 in terms of performance anyway and drivers can be scarce and not properly tested. thnx 8t8. will try mem test tonight just to be sure. also my memory is supposed to run on 2.1V but is currently on 1.8V and when i try to up the voltage i get crashes. this is an old problem not related to my current( i think and hope) any ideas?

8T8

You should not be upping the voltage on DDR-2 the normal operating voltage for DDR-2 is 1.8v if you are overclocking anything in the system that could also be the cause of the problems.

DanGerMus

i havent been overclocking at all. only trying to get my ram's voltage at that which the specs say it should be. ie 2.1 written on the sticks themselves, and 1.9-2.3 on the websites. i assumed that this is it's normal operating voltage. or do i have the wrong end of the stick here? :rolleyes:

dathiultaigh

If you get this again try grabbing the 0x000000... STOP error code as this will definatly help when you re searching for a solution.

8T8

GEIL sells overclockers RAM which is probably the reason why they advertise the higher voltage on it but there is no need to increase the voltage on it when running at stock speeds.

For example here is Crucial 2GB DDR-2 PC6400 & as you can see the operating voltage is 1.8v

DanGerMus

thanx 8t8 that cleared things up... and Dath had another crash today and this is what came up after restart... jpeg attached

8T8

The stop code is should be written in the event log, the link below explains how to turn on the write log in even of crash if it already isn't.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314084

Try increasing the RAM timings one by one as well e.g increase the CAS/Tras from 4 to 5 or 6 & see if anything changes.

DanGerMus

Despite the fact that i have done nothing to fix my problems since they appeared i was able to play BF2142 for 3 hours last night without issue. woohoo. I guess the PC Gods have smiled on me for once and removed the Gremlins from my PC. Anyway fingers crossed no more issues. Also i left my pc running all night and came home to find it as i had left it. til now it had been restarting in the middle of the night all the time. Thanks be to the PC gods... i'll be sacrificing an old GFX card and burning a few CDs in there honour.