Regular Blue Screen Crashes

[Mystico]

Hello,

I got this computer used around February of last year. It was working fine, but in the last four to six months it has descended into a hell of regular blue screen crashing. It crashes when I play games. It crashes sometimes when I'm browsing the internet. It crashes when offline and not doing anything more strenuous than opening a picture. It crashes more often when I'm playing 3d games than it does when I'm playing 2d games, but it still crashes during them sometimes. Sometimes it crashes while rebooting after the last crash, and sometimes it crashes while rebooting from that crash.

Oddly, Windows explorer is crashing frequently now too. On occasion, a blue screen crash follows immediately.

Some of the blue screen messages I've been getting are : SYSTEM SERVICE EXCEPTION, ATIKMDAG, BAD POOL DATA, IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL, and possibly a couple others. I thought at first I had bad RAM installed, so I had my brother try my RAM in his computer. All but one of the sticks worked fine. I tried his confirmed good ones in my computer and it still crashed.

I'm running Windows 7, 64 bit.
I'm now using three sticks of G.SKILL DDRII 1 gb RAM.
My video card is a Radeon HD 6800 series from Gigabyte.


I've gone from thinking this is somehow a sound problem, to a video card problem, to a RAM problem, to a motherboard problem, to honestly having no clue what the family is wrong with my computer. I got it specifically to play stuff like Skyrim and Fallout 3, and haven't been able to play those games for more than about 20 minutes at the most without a crash or series of crashes.

So I'm at my wits' end about this whole thing, and it's gotten to a point way past my limited computer knowledge. If someone can help me solve this problem I would be extremely appreciative.

 

[noidea_77]

Test your ram with memtest86 and check the temperatures with speedfan or an other software.

 

[Mystico]

I'll give it a shot, but my brother gave the RAM a stress test on a different computer, one at a time, running maxed settings Skyrim and photoshop at the same time, getting a lot of hangups, but no crashes. I was really hoping, actually, that it was the RAM because that seemed like the simplest, easiest to fix solution if something was going to have to be replaced.

But I'll still give those things a try.

 

[frombehind]

Does your system by chance boot off an SSD or is your system paging file on a SSD drive?

 

[Mystico]

Does your system by chance boot off an SSD or is your system paging file on a SSD drive?

No, I have a western digital 2TB Caviar Black SATA III. Those SSDs are pretty expensive if I remember right.

 

[frombehind]

They are... but its worth it in terms of the performance you get (I no longer see these things called "loading screens", well, maybe for like 2 sec max in the biggest of games)


I typically see these issues on systems with a failing SSD... data is dumped from the RAM to the drive, and drive corruption causes that data to be different when its copied back to RAM, or prevents it from copying at all.

Have a look in your system and application logs and look for "errors and criticals" this may give you insight into whats actually causing your problem.

[Start] -> "right click" [Computer], select [manage].
Under [system tools] choose [event viewer], then [Windows logs]

Let me know what you find in there. You are looking for things that indicate a repeating pattern, especially seconds before your system blue-screens and crashes.

As a precaution I would schedule a scan-disk with /R switch(repair bad sectors if found) on your hard drive. I say it cant lock the C drive... do you want to scan on next reboot? choose yes.

[Start] type "cmd" into the window at the bottom. You will see command prompt come up in the search, "right-click" it, and choose [run as administrator]

Type "chkdsk C: /r" into the command prompt. Choose "yes"

 

[Mystico]

I'll try some of that stuff, but I've had a new development.

I installed speedfan yesterday, and it showed whatever it has listed as temp 1 overheating badly, like in the 140.f range. I shut the computer down for hours, then cleaned as much dust and crap out of the fans, the power supply, the heat sink, the graphics card, and around the RAM as I could, and put the graphics card back in, and turned it on.

It wouldn't boot up right. After disconnecting and reconnecting the graphics card like four times, checking the ram, checking the hard drive cables, and everything else I could think of, I tried installing an older backup graphics card I had.

It started right up.

How plausible is it that my problem was a combination of one bad RAM stick, overheating, and a graphics card on the way out the entire time?

That other stuff I'll still check out, but it will be a while as I have to download drivers for this other graphics card over a 56k connection.

Something else that sucks is that speedfan is still showing temp 1 as overheating at 138.f with four different fans blowing in the damn thing not counting the one on the graphics card.

 

[frombehind]

The temps you are seeing are on the graphix card, or on the system processor?

To answer your other question... yes, its possible... but we are still just looking at symptoms, not the source of the issue. Multiple components going bad *could* indicate a powersuply that is giving incorrect voltage, possibly damaging components.

 

[Mystico]

I wish I knew. Speedfan just lists it as "Temp1"

Temp2 is 97
Temp3 is 77
HD0 is 106
another one marked Temp1 is 104
Core is 102

I'll check out those events when the drivers finish downloading. Firefox crashed so I have to start over. This crappy default resolution makes it hard to use certain programs...

 

[Mystico]

I ran chkdsk and after four or five hours of checking, it found nothing wrong.

So I tried to check that event viewer, but it's kind of confusing to me. Also, the computer has had a lot less blue screens lately, and none in the past two or three days, so It's not really showing the crashes.

I do have a new pressing problem though.

Speedfan has recently come up with three new listings, Remote 2, GPU, and CPU, and they're all overheating.

My temp listings are as follows, all in Fahrenheit:

temp1: 140
temp2: 97
temp3: 77
HD0 100
temp1(a second one) 104
Core 102
Remote 2: 132
GPU: 145
CPU: 134

It seems like it's gotten a lot hotter in there since I replaced the video card. I'm now using an EVGA e geforce 8800 gts. It does only have one fan, err, some sort of plastic turbine fan thing, actually, where the other one had two fans, but I have four other fans going in there. I don't know if this is normal or not, but the only one of those four actually blowing air IN to the computer case is the power supply fan, the other three seem to be venting air out. Could that be part of the overheating problem, and what can I do about it if it is?

 

[Mystico]

My blue screens have come back with a vengeance.

In event viewer, I saw 107 critical events since August 10th. They are all from Kernel-Power, event id 41, task category (63)

my last blue screen crash this morning was at 10:07:14 am, and I found an error that occurred at 10:06:54 am labeled "sptd" and saying that "driver detected an error in it's data structures for."

The same exact error happened earlier this morning at 04:46:33 and another crash happened at 04:46:52. Then it happened at 10:04:18 and crashed at 10:04:37.

All three of these crashes occurred exactly 19 seconds after the error.

This seems significant.

The details of the error are the following:

- System

- Provider

[ Name] sptd

- EventID 4

[ Qualifiers] 49156

Level 2

Task 0

Keywords 0x80000000000000

- TimeCreated

[ SystemTime] 2012-10-07T17:04:18.546875000Z

EventRecordID 559499

Channel System

Computer BAT-COMPUTER-2

Security


- EventData


000000000100000000000000040004C07C0000000D0000C000000000000000000000000000000000


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Binary data:


In Words

0000: 00000000 00000001 00000000 C0040004
0008: 0000007C C000000D 00000000 00000000
0010: 00000000 00000000


In Bytes

0000: 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 ........
0008: 00 00 00 00 04 00 04 C0 .......À
0010: 7C 00 00 00 0D 00 00 C0 |......À
0018: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0020: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........

The details of one of the critical events are as follows:

- System

- Provider

[ Name] Microsoft-Windows-Kernel-Power
[ Guid] {331C3B3A-2005-44C2-AC5E-77220C37D6B4}

EventID 41

Version 2

Level 1

Task 63

Opcode 0

Keywords 0x8000000000000002

- TimeCreated

[ SystemTime] 2012-10-07T17:07:14.609375000Z

EventRecordID 559583

Correlation

- Execution

[ ProcessID] 4
[ ThreadID] 8

Channel System

Computer BAT-COMPUTER-2

- Security

[ UserID] S-1-5-18


- EventData

BugcheckCode 59
BugcheckParameter1 0xc0000005
BugcheckParameter2 0xfffff80002c8cce0
BugcheckParameter3 0xfffff880054b5000
BugcheckParameter4 0x0
SleepInProgress false
PowerButtonTimestamp 0



I really hope that makes sense to someone. If anyone can tell from all that what piece of hardware is going wrong I'd be really relieved to know. I'm afraid something is making other parts go bad one by one.

 

[Mystico]

This problem has just gotten worse and worse. The only thing I know for sure about it is that I don't know what the problem is.


I have run CHKDSK and it reported no errors. That sounds like the Hard Drive is OK, but after the last few months of this crap, I'm not sure of anything.

I uninstalled the power supply and tried my brother's for a couple hours. The heat levels went down a little bit, and I only got one blue screen, which happened when I tried to play Skyrim.

I will be hopefully be able to get someone to pick me up some blank CDRs today so I can try Memtest86.

I got a program called BlueScreenView a couple of days ago so now I can get a better look at the blue screen errors.


A week or so ago I removed Daemon Tools, then did a complicated process of getting rid of sptd.sys from my computer. It stopped me from getting that specific error but really did nothing for the frequency of my blue screens.

I'm getting a lot of blue screens caused by WIN32K.SYS and ntoskrnl.sys, among others. I'm posting a screenshot of BlueScreenView with some of my errors.


I really need to know what's going on. I'm sure I'm going to have to at least replace my video card and some of my RAM. I suspect the power supply is bad. I also wonder if it wasn't suitable for what hardware it's powering and killed itself and my video card by overworking. It's a 650, and my brother's power supply is a 900, and he's got the same kind of video card which died in my computer, but he's not having problems.

Hopefully I can bring this thread back to life and get a response...I don't have the money to take my computer to any of the geek squad or nerds on call places, and will barely be able to afford the new parts, so I have to fix this myself, but If I don't know what I'm doing that will be quite impossible.

Thanks in advance, again.

http://imageshack.us/f/43/bsvscreen.jpg/