Random reboots & bsod's

Hello, I have a 5 year old 'new' PC my friend & I assembled back in March 2011. What I mean by 'new' is I barely have over 50 uptime hours on it since we built it. This is because at that time we also got new smartphones, tablets & mini-pads & I found that I don't really need to run all the way upstairs (tri-level home, I'm getting old) to my PC to do anything but adjust modem & router settings, so I basically rarely used it. I noticed on the 3rd day of using it, the PC started randomly rebooting back into Windows, then the windows prompt advising that the PC was shut down unexpectantly & on the details tab shows Blue Screen etc. It was rebooting every 2 or 3 hours during a session & during these reboots, I just selected normal statup with no problems after Windows loads, other that the unexpected shutdown prompt.

All is ok in device manage, system file checker, defrag, chkdsk. I have all available current drivers & windows updates.

I never actually got to see the blue screen except once, just this morning, Had to decipher, but the main line had "MEMORY_MANAGER". Anyway, after the latest crash/reboot, windows said there was a problem with the hardware & suggested I run memory diagnostics, which I did & it reported there was problems "with the hardware" & to contact the PC manufacturer.

I already had MemTest v3.5a diagnostics as a bootable CD, so I ran it overnight for 14+ hours & NO problems were found. I reseated the Corsair memory & also moved them in the DIMM 3-4 slots, as they were installed in the 1-2 slots, but my motherboard manual advised to use the 3-4 slots first, so that's where they are now. I re-ran MemTest on each separate stick, then with both, through 3 more stages & no errors detected. The PC actually seems to be running smoother, no problems so far after 5 hours, but I just want to get this hardware crashing straightened out before adding another HDD & external graphics card. Can someone please advise as to how I can determine for a fact that there IS a problem with my Corsair XMS3 4GB (2x2GB) Dual Channel DDR3 10666 1333Hz ram?

Update: Ended up being the ram after all. I bought & installed 2 new sticks (4GB) of the same ram and hasn't crashed since. Corsair approved RMA & is sending new replacement 4gb so I'll just install them to update system to 8GB. Hope there's no problems with the replacements... Happy now.

Hi 7instheaven,

Welcome to the 7forums :)

If I were in your situation I would first ensure that everything got dusted out, all cables proper connected & memory + GPU properly seated.
My guess would be that there was a connection problem, due to dust or something, between the memory and slots given your description.

'A problem with the hardware' doesn't immediately mean that a component is faulty.