PC acting insane, pls help

[e-nigma]

I'm having severe problems with my PC and I can't figure out what's wrong with it.

I have a dual boot system, WinXP Pro and W7 Ult 64 bit, and W7 started to basically "lag", when installing apps, downloading stuff, and so on. It would kind of hang, and cause other apps to stop responding, but they would eventually recover, then go dead again, then back to normal, etc.

I got a couple of BSOD's, but only in W7, so I'm wondering if my RAM is bad. I recently "sort of" recovered from losing my entire boot drive (1 gig of data, gone for good), that no recovery tool could recover the data. It wouldn't boot, and I could not recover any data with any recovery tool.

I've run HD tests, even removed the "faulty" HD in question, reinstalled both OS's, and I just got another BSOD, this time saying "Memory Management", but I've had many different BSODs that were all different.

I have 6 gigs of RAM, and I'm thinking the higher RAM is bad (it's happened before), but I'm not sure what is causing the memory to go bad. I have a very well ventilated case and am only moderately OC-ing, and have just lowered the OC, to see if that was the problem. It doesn't seem to be the problem.

The crashes are inconsistent, and very different things keep happening, so it's really hard to say for sure, what's going on.

When I try a boot disk, that OS (usually a Linux release) never crashes, and all HD tests and memory tests, using different apps, even the 64 bit W7 repair disk memory tester - extended mode, detects 0 errors.

Does the W7 repair disk test ALL of the RAM you have?

Anyone have any other thoughts?

I've of course scanned for viruses, did disk scans, etc, and I do find some disk errors here and there (not surface errors), but fixing them doesn't seem to help.

 

[sadams04]

What are you referring to with the "higher RAM"? Is your 6GB a tripple channel kit, or what type of memory do you have? Temps all in line? You may want to run stress tests (memtest, prime95, etc..) within Windows 7 for an extend period of time to see if you can get a crash. May also want to try running non-OC with a "default" BIOS to see if the failures still happen.

Good luck!! Sounds like one of those PITA issues...

 

[e-nigma]

Hi, I meant the RAM past 32 bit addressing.. Meaning, > 2 GB

I just removed my RAM, and I have 2, 2-channel kits.. one pair of 1 gig sticks (2GB), and one pair of 2 gig sticks (4GB), both crucial ballistix, but different modules (each pair is different)

When booting to a XP repair disk, I got strange errors saying that there was some device failure. Oddly enough, I cleaned the disk and rebooted fine.

I ran the memory test and it immediately detected errors with the 2GB of RAM. The error detection only occurred after I removed the 4GB of RAM.

Now the test is stuck at 10% overall completion, 21% pass 1 of 2.

The app says it can appear like it crashed though, when it didn't, but the progress bars were moving before and now seem pretty stuck, but I don't think the machine has crashed.

Ug. I just hit F1 to see if the pc was still responding, and it went to the options screen, but, it erased the screen like I'm using a 10 year old pc - meaning, instead of instantly erasing the screen and drawing the new one (just a text screen), it took a few seconds to redraw the screen, and now the windows diagnostic tool is dead.. the progress bars read _ of _: _% complete.

Man, wtf is wrong with this pc?

 

[e-nigma]

I think I figured out what is wrong.

After downloading memtest86+ and putting in on a boot floppy, I'm getting crazy errors with 1 pair of RAM sticks, but not with the other pair.

So I guess my RAM was bad all alone (one pair of sticks, the slower RAM, but 2gb vs. the 4gb pair, so that bad and good, respectively). That would be the 2nd pair of Crucial Ballistix to go "bad" on me. One pair had heatsinks that didn't even touch the chips, as I later found out, but I have no idea why this pair died.

Looks like I'm going to have to return the new hard drive that WD is sending to me, as the drive I have is probably fine and just got corrupted when the pc tried to write to it, seeing as the RAM was corrupt, as hell. Never seen so many errors. Wow. How was the machine stable at all? Maybe the first 4 GB's was in use most of the time, and the bad 2 GB only got used with 64-bit w7, so I never saw the errors in XP. Not sure how this would happen though, as the DIMM slots 0, and 1 had the bad ram, so I would think the pc would have used those 2 DIMMS first. Who knows.