Did Windows Vista Screw up my CPU?

Good Evening Everyone,

OK here is the deal. I went to install Windows Vista a long time ago and it worked. About a week later I received a BSOD and Vista broke. I went to reinstall Vista and I received a stop error. The error always occurs right after I tell it to boot from the DVD. Vista loads the files and shows the progress bar across the bottom of the screen. The progress bar finishes and I get the below stop errors:

Vista Home Premium x86 Edition:
STOP: 0x0000008E (0x80000003, 0x89048E1C, 0x86763B58, 0x00000000)

Vista Home Premium x64 Edition:
STOP: 0x000000C4 (0x0000000000000091, 0x0000000000000000, 0xFFFFF8000994EB80, 0x0000000000000000)

I went through a long drawn out process to try and find what component may be causing all my trouble. This is what I tried in no particular order:

-Removed one stick of RAM
-Moved my RAM stick(s) into different slots
-Ran Memtest for 20 passes (NO ERRORS)
-Underclocked the RAM to 667 Mhz
-Placed the jumper on my SATA drive to limit it to 1.5 Gb/s
-Removed my SATA drive and attempted to install on an old IDE drive
-Removed my SATA DVD drive and attempted to install on an old IDE DVD drive
-Removed the CMOS battery for 8 hours
-Cleared the CMOS countless times
-Updated the BIOS
-Downdated (?) the bios. Basically tried an earlier BIOS
-Underclocked the CPU
-Tried an ATI graphics card instead of my 8800GTS 512
-Removed EVERY USB device except for keyboard and mouse
-Erased the hard drive partition table
-Formatted the hard drive MANY times
-Tried different SATA ports on the motherboard for both the hard drive and the DVD drive
-Reseated the CPU
-Tired Patriot memory instead of my OCZ
-Installed an Antec 850 watt PSU instead of my Ultra 650 watt
-Run a Prime95 torture test on both the RAM and CPU with no errors

None of this worked. I can install Windows XP x86 and x64 fine, but not Vista. Tonight I decided to check if the processor was causing the trouble. I put an old 3.0 Ghz Pentium 4 single core with hyperthreading into my motherboard and tried to load Vista. It loaded. I did not try to install Vista, but with the older processor installed I got further than my E6600. I guess it is down to the motherboard or the processor.

Does anyone have an opinion to what is broken? I lapped my E6600 (foolish) and thus lost my warranty. My ASUS P5N32-E SLI is still under warranty and I have sent an RMA request thinking that is the problem. What does everyone think? Is the CPU broken or the motherboard?

Here are my system specs:
E6600 Lapped @ 2.8 GHz (400 MHz FSB, 7 Multi) @ 1.26v
Asus P5N32-E SLI
2 GB OCZ Platinum 1066 MHz @ 800 MHz @ 4-4-4-8-1T
EVGA 8800 GTS 512
Sound Blaster X-Fi platinum
Seagate SATA 250 GB Hard Drive
Lite-On SATA DVD Burner w/Lightscribe
Antec Truepower 850 Watt
Coolermaster Cosmos 1000
Samsung SyncMaster 906BW

Thanks everyone for your opinions,

William

Oh and if I posted this is the wrong place I am sorry, but this area of the forum is the most popular and I am confident someone knows what is wrong.

Unfortunately I have tried installing Vista with no sound card. Before the X-Fi I had the SoundMAX or whatever comes with the P5N32 and those darn stop errors occurred with it as well. The same ones too.

Thank you for the suggestion. If you've got any more ideas I would love to hear them. I find it hard to believe an otherwise stable processor just went bad.

William

I appreciate the ideas. I did not consider a virus in the BIOS. That sounds like a complicated problem. Any idea how to remove one short of getting a new chip?

The Vista DVD's were obtained by lets say illegitimate means, but even if it was the disks that does not explain how it can work with the old processor.

I am going to run Prime95 again overnight as I sleep and maybe an error will pop up. Tomorrow I think I will make a trip to Microcenter and buy a cheap dual core processor to test with. I just hope it is the motherboard.

Thanks for all your help geofelt. I'm off to dig in Google to see if a clue can be had.

William

I had a similar problem like this about a week after installing vista 64bit. Random crashes every 5 minutes and getting worse, i couldn't isolate the problem for ages. I reckoned i had fried the cpu by over clocking.

Anyways I stripped my pc down and put it back together again and it worked without a problem and has been since. In hindsight i reckon i might have knocked some connections lose moving the pc around a few days after I had installed 64 bit. But the reason your pc is working properly with the old chip could be similar to why my pc worked after stripping it down and rebuilding it.

Vista couldn't have killed your CPU. Try setting everything to its stock speeds and install it. I know at first my memory would caus Vista to randomly restart when playing games since I had it set to DDR1066. I have since fixed the problem.

Other than that call Microsoft and ask them. They might be able to tell you what the stop errors are and whats causing it.

I wanted to go higher, however I am unable to make it stable at 3.2 Ghz (400 FSB 8 Multi) and the gains at 3.0 Ghz (333 FSB 9 Multi) are negligible.

I have no active cooling on the northbridge and am not comfortable upping the voltage too much on it without a fan.
I am also weary about upping the Vcore too much because I want to avoid lots of heat and a shorter lifespan on my processor.

try upping or lowering the voltage on the E6600 because it may pass some tests but not be perfectly stable. I found that out with my Q6600 that passed 32 hours of the multicore Prime95 and gave errors when installing stuff.
And don't worry about too much Vcore, Intel says .85-1.5V but just keep it under 1.4V and you will be fine.

LINKAGE?

It is my opinion that Vista did not mess up your CPU.

Check this too: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935806/en-us That one's for the 0x0000008E code

I'm reasonably sure that russki was joking, yes...? I lolled.

Yes, of course I was joking.

In general, it is DIFFICULT for software to mess up hardware; the only piece of sofware I can think of that would have a remote possibility of actually screwing hardware would be the software overclocking suites, and my understanding is that even those are pretty safe, although I can't say I have used them much.

Even the OP saw through that....

TechnologyCoordinator, you disappoint me...

Vista not only killed mu CPU but it killed my little dog Sammy too! Vista is the root of all evil, I'm convinced now.

For a time there I thought maybe there was a lot of mindless anti-Vista FUD spoiling Vista's reputation but this post and a number of others here recently has disabused me of that silly notion.

Loosen these timings back up, and if/when you reinstall - please do so on a freshly formatted (from DOS boot disc and C prompt) Hard drive.

As XP installs fine, the CPU is not physically damaged.
Your OCZ (and Patriot you tried) dimms are not in your mobo's QVL (The qualified is OCZ2T8002GK, 800MHz), and Vista boot process stresses system memory even harder than memtest (experienced from 3 builds).
So I'd get memory dimms in the QVL, or try cheap 800MHz with slow timings like 5-5-5-18 (sounds odd, but it worked for me). In bios, load optimized defaults, save and exit to install vista.
Good luck.

And use a clearhdd. Will wipe clean the first few secotors. Do it 2-3 times to clear the drive.

I do not have Norton Installed. Any time I used it my computer ran slow.

I will give loosen the timings on my memory and see if that helps.

I will also wipe my hard drive as a last resort as I do not want to lose all my data and I only have one drive.

I am really in no huge rush to use Vista, but it is the fact that if I wanted to use it I can't. Anyone else ever experience that?

Thank you everyone for the suggestions, the laughs, and the links. You've all been really helpful with your suggestions. I hope one of them works.

William