I am having a problem with my new computer and was wondering if anyone had any tips for me or courses of action.

Yesterday I purchased a bundle of new hardware and built my new computer. I was pretty excited, I got the machine booted, installed Vista(which took abnormally long), and began installing drivers for my new machine. After installing video and motherboard drivers, something very strange occurred. Doing the most remedial things, such as changing settings, or installing Vista SP2, the computer locks up without cause. Sometimes it will do it after 2 minutes(if, for instance, I attempt to run Age of Conan). If I leave it sitting long enough(no longer than 20 minutes), the computer also crashes.

The list of components is as follows:

OS: Vista Ultimate x64
Motherboard: ASUS P5N-E SLI
CPU: Intel Quad Core Q6600
Memory: 8GB Corsair XMS2 DDR800
Video Card: XFX 8800GS 580m 384MB PCI-E
PSU: Silverstone 1000W Strider Series
Hard Drive: 250gb Seagate SATA

To me, this feels like something in Vista is not working properly, but to be honest I'm stumped about my problem. I am tempted to reformat with my XP copy to see if that corrects the problem.

Edit: I am attempting to install the latest Motherboard drivers, apparently I didn't have the latest version. No change thus far.

mmm maybe its too much ram for the mobo. i dont know how much ram your mobo supports but with your graphics card( and sound card if you have one) maybe over the ram supported for your mobo. i would try to reinstall vista. it didnt take but 30min for me to install it (32bit version) and if it takes a long time again i would say you have a problem with one of your components.

I'll try removing two of the sticks to see if that changes anything. The motherboard claims to support 8GB. I'm going to try one more test run with only half the ram in, and if that doesn't work, I'll try formatting to Vista x32 or XP.

If it were a hardware problem, what do these symptoms tell anyone about which component may be at fault?

you know what i just remembered when i was updating vista oh back before Christmas i had one update that would do that. i dont remember which one. i had to uninstall that spesific update to get my computer to stop crashing. if i remember correctly it had somthing to do with my mobo. like a raid controller that microsoft update thought i should have.( i use raid).

I'm not using a RAID setup, but if it's causing conflicts I'd like to disable it at the very least. Any chance you can get the name of the controller you disabled?

nvidia nforce serial ata controller. i have the bfg 680i mobo.

Have you actually installed Vista SP1? I see you mentioned Vista SP2, but, either I've been under a rock or that's a typo. To support more than 4GB of RAM in Vista 64 you may need either:

MS KB929777 ( http://www.microsoft.com/downloads [...] VORw%3d%3d )

or Vista SP1

My practice is to install Windows with 2GB of RAM install the patch (or, now, SP1) and then shutdown and restore the rest of the RAM.

This may not help your issue, but its food for thought.

halcyon is right i hadnt noticed you said sp2

TEMPS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!????????????????????????

upodate mobo BIOS, before anything else

I meant SP1, small typo

Temps are nominal, around 29c after the system crashes.

Update: Been running steady for well over 2 hours now with 4gb of ram in, so I think I've narrowed it down slightly. The real question is, how do I get the computer to function with the rest of the ram installed?

I can't install the update specified above, Vista claims it does not apply to my computer(which I believe means that the update is already installed), and SP1 is fully installed.

I'm flashing the BIOS now.

Check if you have turned on all advanced ACPI settings in bios.
I had a similar problem with vista x64 power saving features causing crashes before I turned all such settings on in bios.

Could just be a bad memory stick, try swapping the 4gb sets and see if anything changes.

What voltage is your ram at?

Motherboards usualy default to 1.8 volts for DDR2.

Your ram is rated at 1.9 volts

You may have to raise the voltage to 2.0 volts in order to get 4 sticks to run properly.

i agree with what tonyn84 said.

Computer runs fine with both sets of ram in seperately, so now I just have to figure out how to get the comp to agree with 8gb