Hello everyone, I've been having lots of problems with my pc lately so I decided to check with you guys for ideas.
(damn, this post got long
, i tried to format a bit the important areas)
tl;dr version: Currently I can't use my 5 year old pc because of errors: from (rarely) not booting, to hang at "Initializing usb controllers" to BSODs or restarts after post, after the Windows 7 text appears, after the Windows 7 logo appears (very often), the logon screens (also very often) and from time to time it lets me log on but bsods after 1-2 minutes. I got a pair of RAM sticks from a friend, reinstalled Windows 7, booted Windows XP from cd - all nothing changed. The only possiblities left are that the CPU, GPU or motherboard are amalfunctioning and i don't know which one is the problem so i can replace it.
(Also note I've googled and read a lot of posts and i tried to answer most of the obvious questions below.)
PC Specs (bought separately 5 years ago):
CPU: Intel E8400 - never tried to overclock it, stays at 40-50*C
MoBo:MSI P43 NeoF
RAM: 2xADATA 4GB DDR2 800MHz CL5 Gaming Series Dual Channel Kit
GPU: HIS ATI Radeon HD4850 IceQ 4 512MB DDR3 256-bit - it gets pretty hot in idle at 50+*C but the fan is only at 30%, if i set it manually to 100% it goes down to ~40*C even with some load so i don't think overheating is a problem, just badly programed fan to prioritise silence
PSU: Sirtec - High Power HP-450-A12S @450W
HDD: 1xWD 640 GB, 1xSeagate 1TB (this one only a year old)
(bsods minidumps below)
The story:
So, 3-4 weeks ago for some reason (no new hardware or something suspicious) my pc started having a few blue screens right at the logon screen (as far as i remember) but after 2-3 restarts it would all go fine and work for 10+ hours with no problems. Then, I went away for 2 weeks on holiday and when I came back but there were way more blue screens at various times - even before logon screen, and while doing random things like maximizing a youtube video or right clicking on desktop.
Now, the 2nd or 3rd day when i tried to use my pc there were just too many bsods to the point that i couldn't log on after something like an hour so I decided to do some more troubleshooting: full chkdisk, the sfc /scannow, antivirus/malware scans but no luck, so I decided to exclude any software problem with a fresh reinstall of windows but no change... more and more bsods.
Currently I can't use the pc at all, I managed to get into safe mode for a few minutes to copy the minidumps to a memory stick and then it crashed (for some reason trying to load up firefox crashed the program, and after a few tries it did a bsod).
So that's the current state: random blue screens and when I get into windows random programs crash
Short infos:
After googleing some error codes from the bsods I thought the RAM was the problem so I ran 6+ hours of memtest86+ but no errors.
- Yesterday I borrowed a pair of 2x1Gb ram sticks from a friend but no change in errors (yes, i tried various combinations and all the slots) so I excluded RAM from possible culprits.
- I unplugged all non-essential things from the pc and no difference
- I thought maybe the Windows 7 or HDD or sata cable were damaged so I unplugged both of my hdds and ran the "Mini Windows XP" from Hiren's boot cd but it still crashed (i still could use it for a while though) so HDD aren't the problem either
- I cleared the dust and re-checked all the connectors but nothing changed but i noticed something yellowish on top of two of the condensers (or capacitor, or how it's called), this made me think that the motherboard has failed : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/45931250/bsods/20130928_101233.jpg
- I removed everything from the pc case and assembled the motherboard with only ram, gpu, cpu, hdd (also tried with only dvdrom) and power supply but still the same errors. So I figured out the only possibility was the CPU, motherboard or GPU - I couldn't get another gpu to test and i don't have an integrated graphics card so i can't test it (I did use Video Memory Tester but no errors were given);
- I tried testing the CPU with prime95 but it either gives me an error: "rounding was 0.5 expected less than 0.4" or it simply crashes after a few seconds/minutes - so CPU might be faulty too.
- I never overclocked anything
- the RAMs appear at their correct timings in bios (although they run at 1.8V but on them it says 1.9-2.1V)
- sometimes it doesn't even post, but after a restart or two it works
- Very rarely (i think 3 times) but maybe it helps, the pc froze while I was in bios trying to modify stuff.
- I should also mention that random applications crash while I manage to log on, like explorer, firefox, chrome, CPUz, games
- also while logged on I got a message that the display driver has stopped responding but was succesfully recovered
- tried modifying some settings in bios but I couldn't find anything that influenced the errors
I have looked at some bsods and their parameters are pretty weird:
- some drivers try to read/write to adresses like 0x0....0 and 0xFF....FF which as far as i know shouldn't happen
- one of them indicated some wrong bit in a CPU register (i don't remember exactly) which worried me it might be cpu's fault
- memory management errors everywhere
- lots of error's messages include kernel, irqls, page faults and PFN list
The conclusion:
That's all the info I can think of right now, if you need more feel free to ask me.
The reason I'm here is that if I buy a new motherboard and discover that it was my CPU or something else then I'm screwed because I have to buy a very specific one that supports DDR2 and lga 775 CPU so if then i find out that the cpu was the problem then i'd have a buy the same generation of cpu and i'd rather upgrade if i actually have to buy new parts.
Archive with current minidump folder:
- Some of the more common BSODs are: 0x7E, 0x7F, 0x1A, 0x50, 0x0A, 0x1E, 0x7A and 0xF4 (there are more BSODs happening than the ones in the minidump folder that somehow don't get stored there, for example probably today i got 20+ BSODs but there are only 7 in the folder)
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/45931250/bsods/Minidump.rar
(damn, this post got long
, i tried to format a bit the important areas)tl;dr version: Currently I can't use my 5 year old pc because of errors: from (rarely) not booting, to hang at "Initializing usb controllers" to BSODs or restarts after post, after the Windows 7 text appears, after the Windows 7 logo appears (very often), the logon screens (also very often) and from time to time it lets me log on but bsods after 1-2 minutes. I got a pair of RAM sticks from a friend, reinstalled Windows 7, booted Windows XP from cd - all nothing changed. The only possiblities left are that the CPU, GPU or motherboard are amalfunctioning and i don't know which one is the problem so i can replace it.
(Also note I've googled and read a lot of posts and i tried to answer most of the obvious questions below.)
PC Specs (bought separately 5 years ago):
CPU: Intel E8400 - never tried to overclock it, stays at 40-50*C
MoBo:MSI P43 NeoF
RAM: 2xADATA 4GB DDR2 800MHz CL5 Gaming Series Dual Channel Kit
GPU: HIS ATI Radeon HD4850 IceQ 4 512MB DDR3 256-bit - it gets pretty hot in idle at 50+*C but the fan is only at 30%, if i set it manually to 100% it goes down to ~40*C even with some load so i don't think overheating is a problem, just badly programed fan to prioritise silence
PSU: Sirtec - High Power HP-450-A12S @450W
HDD: 1xWD 640 GB, 1xSeagate 1TB (this one only a year old)
(bsods minidumps below)
The story:
So, 3-4 weeks ago for some reason (no new hardware or something suspicious) my pc started having a few blue screens right at the logon screen (as far as i remember) but after 2-3 restarts it would all go fine and work for 10+ hours with no problems. Then, I went away for 2 weeks on holiday and when I came back but there were way more blue screens at various times - even before logon screen, and while doing random things like maximizing a youtube video or right clicking on desktop.
Now, the 2nd or 3rd day when i tried to use my pc there were just too many bsods to the point that i couldn't log on after something like an hour so I decided to do some more troubleshooting: full chkdisk, the sfc /scannow, antivirus/malware scans but no luck, so I decided to exclude any software problem with a fresh reinstall of windows but no change... more and more bsods.
Currently I can't use the pc at all, I managed to get into safe mode for a few minutes to copy the minidumps to a memory stick and then it crashed (for some reason trying to load up firefox crashed the program, and after a few tries it did a bsod).
So that's the current state: random blue screens and when I get into windows random programs crash
Short infos:
After googleing some error codes from the bsods I thought the RAM was the problem so I ran 6+ hours of memtest86+ but no errors.
- Yesterday I borrowed a pair of 2x1Gb ram sticks from a friend but no change in errors (yes, i tried various combinations and all the slots) so I excluded RAM from possible culprits.
- I unplugged all non-essential things from the pc and no difference
- I thought maybe the Windows 7 or HDD or sata cable were damaged so I unplugged both of my hdds and ran the "Mini Windows XP" from Hiren's boot cd but it still crashed (i still could use it for a while though) so HDD aren't the problem either
- I cleared the dust and re-checked all the connectors but nothing changed but i noticed something yellowish on top of two of the condensers (or capacitor, or how it's called), this made me think that the motherboard has failed : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/45931250/bsods/20130928_101233.jpg
- I removed everything from the pc case and assembled the motherboard with only ram, gpu, cpu, hdd (also tried with only dvdrom) and power supply but still the same errors. So I figured out the only possibility was the CPU, motherboard or GPU - I couldn't get another gpu to test and i don't have an integrated graphics card so i can't test it (I did use Video Memory Tester but no errors were given);
- I tried testing the CPU with prime95 but it either gives me an error: "rounding was 0.5 expected less than 0.4" or it simply crashes after a few seconds/minutes - so CPU might be faulty too.
- I never overclocked anything
- the RAMs appear at their correct timings in bios (although they run at 1.8V but on them it says 1.9-2.1V)
- sometimes it doesn't even post, but after a restart or two it works
- Very rarely (i think 3 times) but maybe it helps, the pc froze while I was in bios trying to modify stuff.
- I should also mention that random applications crash while I manage to log on, like explorer, firefox, chrome, CPUz, games
- also while logged on I got a message that the display driver has stopped responding but was succesfully recovered
- tried modifying some settings in bios but I couldn't find anything that influenced the errors
I have looked at some bsods and their parameters are pretty weird:
- some drivers try to read/write to adresses like 0x0....0 and 0xFF....FF which as far as i know shouldn't happen
- one of them indicated some wrong bit in a CPU register (i don't remember exactly) which worried me it might be cpu's fault
- memory management errors everywhere
- lots of error's messages include kernel, irqls, page faults and PFN list
The conclusion:
That's all the info I can think of right now, if you need more feel free to ask me.
The reason I'm here is that if I buy a new motherboard and discover that it was my CPU or something else then I'm screwed because I have to buy a very specific one that supports DDR2 and lga 775 CPU so if then i find out that the cpu was the problem then i'd have a buy the same generation of cpu and i'd rather upgrade if i actually have to buy new parts.
Archive with current minidump folder:
- Some of the more common BSODs are: 0x7E, 0x7F, 0x1A, 0x50, 0x0A, 0x1E, 0x7A and 0xF4 (there are more BSODs happening than the ones in the minidump folder that somehow don't get stored there, for example probably today i got 20+ BSODs but there are only 7 in the folder)
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/45931250/bsods/Minidump.rar
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