Blue screen of death while playing ANY game.

[posm2235]

I've been getting blue screens or random power downs when i play any game.

My old PSU went bad, it was a 750 watt single rail. It wouldn't even light the LED on my mobo. I bought a 850 watt quad rail, it'd boot up and i'd be able to play a game for a good 20 minutes before it'd blue screen or power down. So i figured i'd return it for a refund. I thought it was it being quad rail.

I just got a 1000watt single 12v rail PSU. It still blue screens on me. I can do anything else aside from play games.


I got an Asus a8n-sli deluxe mobo.
An AMD 64 x2 dual core CPU.
A geforce 8800 GTS GPU.
2 gigs of ram
Running on XP SP3.

 

[shortstuff_mt]

It's likely the first PSU damaged a component when it failed. BSOD's are often RAM related. The first things I'd do is try each stick of RAM by itself. You should also ensure the RAM speed, timings, and voltage are manually set to the correct values in the BIOS and perform an overnight Memtest86+ test to check for RAM errors.

What are your complete system specs?

 

[posm2235]

I'm running a defrag right now. It hasn't been defragged in a year or so. MY computer is also extremely dusty. I bought one of those compressed air cans awhile back and got alot of dust outta there. I'll do that memtest thing after the defrag.

I was hoping nothing else was damaged. My mobo is getting kinda old and i figure if i gotta replace the mobo or the cpu i might as well upgrade everything. Which would be too spendy at the moment.

What's the easiest way to post my complete specs? i couldn't even tell you the specs of the ram off hand.

 

[dkapke]

I second the RAM issue. I'd almost guarantee a stick (or two) was damaged when the PSU went out. I've seen it countless times. I've got a buddy that has no issues with anything he does on his PC, but as soon as he fires up WoW, it'll blue screen within 30 minutes. MemTest86 didn't show any errrors, but if he took one of the sticks out, it worked flawlessly for days. Replaced the faulty stick and has had no issues since. Do what shortstuff says - it has nothing to do with defrag.

 

[flyboy86]

I second what dkapke said about memtest. My laptop was bsod awhile back. When I ran memtest it also didn't show any errors. I replaced the memory anyways and it worked.

 

[posm2235]

I pulled 2 sticks of ram and it's been working.

Thanks guys.