Comp locking up while playing games.

mattieyo

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Dec 23, 2009
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18,510
recently i was playing WoW and out of the blue my comp, as in ventrilo quit working and my mouse no longer moved not just the game quit working, started locking up and coming back to life with the game still displayed and no black screen or blue screen of death. when it would lock up it lasted good 5-10 minutes this is repeating. i then hit alt+f4 to close the program for when it came back to life. i then tried streaming youtube and it works fine. i eventually got a error screen saying error #132 "memory could not be read" upon other research i may have bad ram, or my power supply isnt giving out enough power. i then checked my bios and voltages seem normal im guessing. temps are at 34C. idk what else to try. im stumped. every attempt at solving this issue i would run counter-strike source video stress test and the same problems kept accuring. 5-10 minute lockups, i was still able to hit f10 to close program and the comp then ran fine with the game closed.

-core 2 duo e4400
-2x g.skill ddr2 800 1gb
-7600gt
-550W rosewill
-p45 gigabyte MB
-windows xp home edition fully updated.

any advice is great before i spend 100$ on a power supply that may not solve my issue.. thank you.
 
From your description, the issues only occurs when running video/gpu intensive applications. My first guess would be heat. Have you cleaned out any colonies of dust bunnies that may have taken up residence inside you case, fans, and heatsinks?

While a 550W psu is enough power,overall, for your system, Rosewill psu's are known to not exactly be the best quality psu. But all things considered, I would clean out any and all dust that may have accumulated inside the case, around the fans, and that may have gotten trapped in the heatsinks.
 

mattieyo

Distinguished
Dec 23, 2009
3
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18,510
dust and heat are not the issue. 50C my gpu and 40C my cpu run at while in video stress test also this stress test really isnt stress at all for my machine. what im experiencing is a hardware issue. something in my machine is failing under loads. ram may be failing or my psu isnt being efficient. and im not expereinced enough to know how to test these. i also just reformatted 2 weeks ago fully updated drivers and the problem started when i was playing WoW 2 days ago. this is a hardware issue.

right now i have speedfan on. for volts it reads - +3.3V 3.33V - +5V 4.89V - +12V 2.90 and is bouncing to 2.20V this is puzzling me with my lack of experience to me this doesent look normal referring to the +12V

thanks again for help.
 
As mentioned, run some stress tests, notably Prime95 and MemTest.

But if heat and dust is not the issue, it could very well be the psu. As mentioned, Rosewill psu's are not known for being the best. And, if you are getting less than 3v on the +12v rail, then my next guess would be the psu is going bad.