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#1
Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool stops at 88% complete
I have bought a new PC for my wife without OS. It is an Acer N2120G supplied only with FreeDOS on the HD. I have installed Win 7 Pro via a USB flash drive, using the Windows DVD/USB tool from the install DVD without any great difficulty.
Everything works but once she started using it she gets crashes about once a day. I tried it myself and get the same problem. At present there isn't anything elaborate installed. Mainly it will be used for browsing and emails and a few of the built in card games.
She had to stop using it so I could check it all. I started with simple checks like PW and SFC and they looked fine. I went back to the AMD website and their auto detect told me that I had all the up to date drivers.
Just to be safe, I updated all the drivers from the supplied driver CD. I was especially cautious about the graphics card as I know that can be very sensitive! But the crashes still occurred - maybe after 6 hours - maybe after 6 minutes
I also wiped the 5GB partition used for FreeDOS and set it as an unallocated, empty, space as we will never need the full 500GB on the HD.
A couple of days ago I set the PC to run the Memory Diagnostic from Administrative Tools. Just the standard shutdown and run option. (I had already tried a WinDiag CD that I have had for years and that didn't show any problems, but I know it was designed before 4GB RAM was allowable. So I thought it best to try again with the up to date tool.)
The result of the test was just a reboot without any message. As I was expecting some sort of "report" I ran it again and it just froze at 21%. The PC still worked and didn't crash the rest of the day after manually restarting.
So today I tried to be a bit more investigative! I ran the test on the PC and at the same time on an old laptop that is very slow but capable of taking the Win 7 update. I started them both together in Extended mode.
The laptop struggled through and after 5 hours rebooted and showed a message that there were no problems.
But as I type this, at about 8 hours, the PC is still showing" pass 1 of 2: 88% complete. It has been at that point for 3 hours so I guess there must be a problem! But I assumed that the tool would finish and give me a report if it found a fault or faults?
Any ideas on what to do now to narrow it down? (Going from earlier uses of the PC, if I just switch off and restart it will reboot OK.)
Tony