Blue screening, need help please!

[fofofosho]

I recently build my own PC early this July. Midway through July I started getting BSOD's and was getting worried because they started happening very frequently. To this day, they still happen and reoccur everyday. The different blue screens I get are; Memory management(most frequent), and System except error.(there is another one but it hasn't happened in a while.) I have gone onto many forums and tried trying what others had suggested like, run memtest, hard drive tests, the src /scannow, and stresstests and nothing is corrupt. I have also updated my BIOS and all my drivers are current. Please help!!

MSI P67A-G43 (B3)
2nd Gen. Sandy Bridge Intel i5-2500
XFX HD-687A-ZNFC Radeon HD 6870 1GB
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB 2x4GB 1333
Samsung 1 TB 7200 32MB
Cooler Master GX Series 750W

 

[tsnor]

Hi, Do you have a spare disk drive? If so pull your current drive out, install a fresh copy of windows. See if your system now runs error free.

The errors you described could be hardware related. They could also be software problems. Since you've looked at HW problems already, suggest you look for SW problems for a while.

 

[fofofosho]

If you think its software, then what do you suggest running?

I was going to buy an additional internal hard drive for school and programming things and run ubuntu on it but since I've been having all these problems, I'm concerned if ill be having the same issues with ubuntu. So do you think its even worth running another OS?

 

[tsnor]

Here are some thoughts, the guys in the windows forum will do a better job if you post there.

First: Debugging software errors is a pain. What do you have on the PC that you would miss if you reformatted the drive and rebuilt your copy of windows from scratch? If you can, I'd really do this instead of debugging.

If you need to keep that PC as is, before you do anything else, get a clean backup. Use windows backup to save everything to an external USB disk drive. No matter how careful you are, you could break something.

Then make sure your antivirus is updated (use Microsoft Secuity Essentials free download if you don't have one) and do a deep scan of your PC. Ditto windows defender.

Look at installed programs and get rid of everything you don't want -- the programs that are there because stuff accumulates. Maybe this will stabilize pc. Reboot a few times after the un-installs and then see if the blue screens are gone.

launch msconfig and see what starts up at boot time. Google will help you match up the program names that get launched with the software they are providing. Use selective boot to come up with as little stuff as possible. See if the system blue screens if you let it sit doing nothing. If so then do a windows update reinstall to make sure windows is clean (http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/3413-repair-install.html)
But it is never windows, its always some program that got partially inserted and is still going to be there after the windows install in place. Deleting devices in device manager will cause windows to refresh it's copy of the driver. post back if you get this far.

If the system stabilizes after you suppress most of the start up programs, then start re enabling them one at a time until you have the right one. It can get nasty. Took me forever to discover a failed partial dot net update was the reason for intermittent fails in my ati device driver.

Again, I'd take this to the pros in the windows forum. i just brute force this stuff.

re: Ubuntu. If you have a clean copy and it runs well then it's less likely this is a hardware problem. If ubuntu has problems then you'll have to decide if that means the hardware is bad or if that means you have one software problem on windows and a different one on Linux.

If you were going to buy a drive anyway, why not pull your current drive and rebuild windows on the new one. You'll still have your old system image if something goes wrong. If the rebuild windows system runs fine then you know it was a software problem and have the option of trying to fix it, or just moving to the new rebuild windows image. Later you can use the disk for Ubuntu.

 

[fofofosho]

thanks for you advice. I've been really busy these few couple of days so I haven't had time to try and debug my computer. I will try and repost my problems to microsoft's forums and see what happens. Before I do so, do you think it would be smart to just wipe everything from my Harddrive and just start fresh? I have my OEM cd and code but I'm not sure if the OEM code can be used in this way.