Windows 7: Restarts and crashes and bears, oh my

Hello all,

So I'll get right down to the pertinent details and try to be as clear and concise as I can.

This is the first computer I have attempted to build on my own without semi-professional help. I bought all the parts and assembled them, and through much toil, sweat, and troubleshooting, my creation came to life. (I got Windows 7 installed and booting.)

I have had what I believe to be several separate issues that I have resolved one at a time, until this last and glaring problem of random restarts. I will be playing a game, or doing some other task on the computer and the screen will black for an instant and then present me with multicolored scrambles and the audio will stutter on a loop of the last sound. (duration ~.3 sec) The computer will then reboot.

I do have auto restarts disabled, but it usually does not present a blue screen or create a minidump. I have gotten to a blue screen occasionally and gotten a dump out of it and they are attached. All I get out of the Event Viewer is Kernel Error 41 bugcheckcode 0.

Let me tell you what I have done:



Made sure all of my drivers were up to date. (using driver cleaners to make sure the old ones were out)
Up to date BIOS.
Disabled the AMD power save equivalent on the processor. (Cool&Quiet, I think) I had heard this could sometimes cause trouble.
Scanned for viruses and malware.
Ran the memory through 20 memtest extensive cycles, no errors.
Ran checkdisk several times, no problems.
Ran sfc scan it said everything was fine.
I have done an upgrade installation to replace the Windows files, so see if that might help.
Turned off the nonessential startup items.
I have removed all the unnecessary scheduled tasks.
Used Driver Verifier to run all of the options except for low resource simulation. (This DID result it ferreting out a RealTek Audio Driver that I uninstalled, still crashes)

So after all of that, I still feel in my gut it's a software issue and that the hardware is ok. If it is the hardware, however, I need to figure out which piece quickly so I can RMA it. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks for your time.

I have no clue but if I had no guess I'd say it's your video card. Do you have any secondary sets of hardware to test with?

Unfortunately I don't have other hardware of a similar type. Is there a way I can run some sort of diagnostic to determine if it's a hardware issue with the video card? Is there a stress test or something I could use that would work?

ATI Radeon Sapphire 5830: Try disabling all the helper services for this card. ATI and nVidia have a habit of installing useless services that can make a machine reboot for no reason or lockup.

OK, an update:

I tried disabling some of the services for the video card, with no luck, the crashes continued. So I resorted to doing a clean install of Windows 7 to wipe everything and start over.

At this point in time, I have installed the updated drivers in the fresh install and I got a crash. So I turned on driver verifier and I've got a couple blue screens since then. (~24 hours, of my 5 hours of use about 5 crashes) I've attached the minidumps in case anybody can shed some light on this.

I don't have really anything installed right now, just (up to date) hardware drivers. Does anybody have some insight?

Looks like:

gdrv.sys = Dynamic Energy Saver Advanced, I would update this from GigaByte website. (Gigabyte Web Design - WHAT WE DO (Home Page)) or remove.

and

atdcm64a.sys = ATI DSM Dynamic Driver


*** STOP: 0x000000c4 (0x00000000000000f6, 0x00000000000004a0, 0xfffffa80047b45b0,
0xfffff88007f7c809)
*** gdrv.sys - Address 0xfffff88007f7c809 base at 0xfffff88007f7b000 DateStamp
0x49b9d175


*** STOP: 0x000000c9 (0x000000000000020e, 0xfffff8800798a432, 0xfffff9800faf0ea0,
0x0000000000000000)
*** atdcm64a.sys - Address 0xfffff8800798a432 base at 0xfffff88007988000 DateStamp
0x4b732a0f

Check out this web site:

[SOLVED] BSOD every few minutes on new computer - Tech Support Forum

Thanks WindowsStar!

It looks like I'm still not out of the woods yet though. I fixed the BSOD problem by removing the program, however I was still getting random restarts with no blue screen or dumps.

With that thought, I decided to run memtest86+ (the last memory tester I used was the Windows version), and I got a thousands of errors. Double checking the timings of the ram and such (they were fine), I upped the voltage a bit and that resulted in less errors in memtest but still some. I eventually narrowed it all down to a bad stick of ram, that had passed my memory test before.

I am RMAing the RAM and hopefully will be problem free with a new set.