Computers Hate Me

It never fails, I can repair and construct PCs flawlessly for other people but when it comes to my own PCs... hell no.

I decide to upgrade my work computer and it gave me problems all the way...

Old Setup:
Intel P-III ~1GHz
512 MB PC133 SDRAM
40 GB HDD
On Board 4 MB Video
Windows 2000 Pro

New Setup:
Intel P-IV @ 2.4 GHz
512 MB PC2800 DDR
2 - 40GB HDD
128 MB nVidia GeForce 4 AGP 8x Video
Windows XP Pro Corp Edition

Like I said it gave me problems all the way but I finally got it functioning smoothly yesterday

Now My home PC is acting up.

So I install Rome Total War yesterday and Lock-On (which by the way runs great at high video settings) and well during some installs I get the notorious Blue Screen of Death (BSD).

Well since I had a bunch of garbage on my PC I decided now would be as good a time as any to test out my copy of Windows XP x64 bit edition for 64 bit processors. I had a legitimite 180 day (6 month) free trial from Microsoft. Since I usually rebuild my PC every 6 months to a year this comes in handy.

So I save important files like Music, Documents, and of course World of Warcraft since I don't want to spend the 4 hours to reinstall it again. Anyways, after the format of the 200 GB HDD and initialization of the Win XP x64 setup.... BSD! again.

Well the BSD makes me believe the RAM is at fault, MACHINE-CHECK-EXCEPTION System is trying to execute non-executable memory. Anyways I take out the 2 chips and bring them into work here with me to have my Comp guys run them through the RAM tester. They both passed the Simple Test just fine but on the in depth test one of my 512MB chips had problems during the heat test. Apparently when it heated up it failed to dump the memory and locked up. So this could be the source of my problems. Since I bought the memory from New Egg only 4 1/2 months ago, I am going to give them a call and see if I have any warranty left on these chips. Hopefully I do.

In the mean time I am going to take these chips back home and try running them like my Comp guy suggested as DDR 333 MHz @ 2.5 Volts instead of DDR 400 @ 2.7 (I think that's what I was running). These are DDR 400 chips @ 2.5 V but we'll see. If I get the BSD again I am going to remove the 1 bad 512 chip and see if it works with out it. If I continue to get the BSD well then I guess my problems is more in depth. Most likely at that point it would be one of my PCI cards: Modem, Video, NIC, TV Capture, & Sound. After that, well it would then have to be the MoBo. Either way, first things first, check the memory.

Wish me luck guys.

Young