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Various issues with BSOD's - Windows 7
Greetings. Unfortunately I've been experiencing a number of issues with my new system and to be perfectly honest, I'm a bit lost as to the cause. Fresh installation of Windows 7 (x64), latest BIOS and mainboard drivers installed plus latest versions of drivers for the rest of the subsystems. Initially my rig came with a Radeon 5850, which is basically where the problems started.
At completely random intervals, I would get a grey screen with vertical white stripes and the machine would either reboot automatically (with a memory dump, indicating a serious error) or simply lock up after the stripes appearing and I would have to do a hard-reset. The issue was kind of rare at first, so I didn't pay much attention to it, but at some point those crashes would occur every 10-15 minutes basically making it impossible to do anything with the PC. Each and every time I would get the "crash", a 0x00000124 bugcheck error report would be created in the event viewer (dumps : 011410-15724-01.dmp, 011410-15475-01.dmp and 011410-15553-01.dmp).
Attributing the crashes to a faulty video card and/or drivers and since the video card from my previous system (an Nvidia MSI GTX 260) was in perfect working condition and had served me well for quite some time, I decided to swap the Radeon card, after removing the Catalyst video drivers completely (using Driver Sweeper). The new card booted immediately and fine and just as I was running the installation program for the new video drivers (freshly downloaded from the official website), I got a BSOD before the program had a chance to complete (dump : 011410-23618-01.dmp). I probably tried 1000 ways to install those drivers, including (but not limited to), booting into safe mode, removing any traces of previous installations (with Driver Sweeper where needed), running the driver installation in safe mode, only to get BSOD's when trying to boot Windows 7 in a normal way (dumps : 011410-16692-01.dmp, 011410-28329-01.dmp, 011410-19796-01.dmp, 011410-19593-01.dmp, 011410-15412-01.dmp). After removing 1 stick of RAM from the system (running with 4 Gigs instead of 6), I tried installing the driver again, it did BSODed eventually but not before actually installing the necessary files (except PhysX I believe, which I installed later on, by hand).
After that point and until this moment, the system has been stable and I'm basically able to run both applications and 3D games like a charm with no noticeable issues. Doing a little research on those dumps myself however (with the help of the BlueScreenView utility), I opted to download and create a bootable DVD with Memtest86+, in order to run a memory test overnight and identify any potential memory corruption (since the dump reports seem to indicate something wrong with my sticks, I think...). After 6 hours and 30 minutes of testing (approx. 6 passes), memtest wasn't reporting any errors (with all 3 sticks of 6 GB plugged in that is), so I decided to check the hard drives for errors, hell I even did an "sfc /scannow" just to ensure the integrity of the system files. Nothing abnormal whatsoever.
I have a suspicion that a couple of USB external devices that I usually always leave connected (an old HP scanner and a logitech mx 700 mouse) might have been the actual culprit due to maybe drivers that Win 7 don't like for some reason but I haven't been able to verify this (at this point I'm too afraid to do anything that will threaten the stability of the system). I'm also not entirely sure that my memory isn't faulty.
Would appreciate any insight, suggestions etc.
Thanks in advance.
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), I'm going to run an "Extensive Test" (which I reckon is a surface scan) later on.