Windows 7: [Freeze]Application broke windows

System was extremely stable before with uptimes in weeks and no BSODS whatsoever. Restarts always went smoothly, software was maintained properly and relatively malware-free.

I install this old game called Startopia and run it. A few minutes after starting play, the system goes BSOD. I restart and try to play again - the system freezes. Since I don't have a physical reset button, I flick the power switch on the PSU off and on. The whole system was frozen still, no drive head movement was taking place. Yes, I checked.

The system restarts, in normal mode, as soon as loading windows appears. Running system repair from the HDD freezes the machine as soon as the "Windows is loading files" bar is filled. Running from win 7 DVD displays a loading bar, after which the screen flickers between display modes before getting frozen dead in VGA.

RAM has been tested before, multiple times. I haven't heard of DDR2 chips getting damaged by cutting power through the PSU switch.

GFX card doesn't display artifacts.

HDD setup is 2x 7200.12 in RAID 0. This may make retrieving logs difficult.

With everything but the PSU and monitor cable in, the symptoms are the same.



How do I fix this crap?

Removing the RAM and putting one chip in solved the issue.

Putting in the RAM chips one by one should work, even if putting them all in will result in the system failing to boot.

Interestingly, although it initially appears the RAM chips are broken, once they start working, memtest fails to detect anything wrong with them over a 4-hour period of testing - at least that's how it was the last three times.

This issue happened to me another time this year - a software fault generated some sort of weird error, that can only be solved by moving around RAM chips. And memtest shows the chips to be OK.

Vodoo magic, friends.

And second post, hello.

Shutting a computer off like that can result in all sorts of failures. Ram, HD, CPU, raid controller, etc.

I would boot into safe mode and check the raid driver in device manager.

Ken

It appears that one ram chip broke - with that particular ram chip in even the bios fails to boot. With 4 slots for RAM and 2x1gb, 2x2gb, some configurations work, some don't.

I bet that I'll plug the chip in tomorrow, run memtest and it'll have 0 errors as always. Currently have 2x1gb KingMax (not to be confused with kingstone) and 1x2gb GoodRam, which on second thought isn't that good.