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#1
Erratic BSOD's after a few minutes, RAM prob working
Hi all!
About three months ago my computer (2 yrs, custom, NOT overclocked afaik) would get BSOD's at mostly random points (once a day or so), which was unacceptable. By using memtest and Windows' own memtest I isolated the fault to a single of my 4 GB Corsair Vengeance RAM's. I took it out, and my computer worked fine for a while, so I decided 12 GB was enough.
But lately the problem has returned. Now I get BSOD's after every half hour or so of usage. Usually, Windows will do something strange first, such as stop responding, GUI elements freezing, explorer crashing, applications crashing to desktop... and then moments later, a BSOD and a restart.
So I took out all the RAM and returned to my supplier for reparations (including the one I took out earlier). I also bought another, new Corsair Vengeance 4GB while it was being fixed. I put it in and - still getting BSOD's! So the memory is probably not at fault.
What could be causing this? I've run chkdsk on all my discs and they seem to work fine (one fixed some unallocated areas). I've run memtest and it seems to work fine. Could it be the motherboard, or any of my harddrives - can the harddrives cause a BSOD? The CPU/fans? Is it a Windows problem? (My paging file never gets used, as I don't run out of memory). Any tips on things I can do to test and isolate the error would be hugely appreciated! (I have a Ubuntu Live CD to do tests on if needed)
(I've read the tutorial on dumps, so next time one happens I can post it here - what type of dump should I provide?)
Note some oddities:
- My user directory is installed on E:/, my 2 TB drive, instead of the 64 GB SSD where I keep Windows. I did this through a tricky installation process. This has never been a problem before though.
- My third drive has some backups and system images if they can be useful.
- One BSOD happened just *after* a file was fully saved, and when I opened it again, it was full of null bytes.