Hi, I recently installed Vista 64 premium on a new computer, and I am experiencing crashes with almost everything but IE7. 3dmark06 and BF2 run for a few minutes then crash, orthos crashes, as do prime95, memtest86, cpuz and other benchmarking programs. The WinSAT that came with vista also can't complete itself; my screen and mouse freeze when it starts to scan the memory. I think there might be something wrong with my memory, but what really frustrates and concerns me is that the windows memory diagnostic tool never works. It freezes after only 1-3% (I left it on for at least 30min and it had not progressed and the f1 control was unresponsive).  Is there some other way to test my ram or stop my computer from constantly freezing?
 
q6600 with ultra 120 ext. heatsink
2 x 2gb g.skill ddr2 800 (the memory seems pretty warm after a little use, is this normal?)
Gigabyte p35 ds3r mobo
640mb 8800 gts
 
Any help would be greatly appreciated  
 

 
Try increasing the memory voltage in BIOS to mfg. specs (2.0-2.1v).
 

Unfotunately, that didn't make a difference. Could this actually be a problem with Vista?

 
I dual boot Vista 32 HP with Windows XP Pro on my two main machines every day.  Vista runs perfect.  One has an 1800xt and the other has a 7900GTO 512.  Video card drivers for Vista have dramatically improved over the past 2 months for both ATI and Nvidia.  I have no problem running Vista what so ever. Many say the 64 bit OS's are not worth the trouble.  I'm sure there is where your problem lays. MS will release SP1 Beta next Tuesday.

If you can't run memtest 86+, then it is almost certainly a memory problemand not vista.   Memtest is a stand alone program.  Try running memtest with only one stick at a time, and in different memory slots to check out that the mobo slots are good.  Once you isolate the bad component, it's RMA time.