Help with possible driver problems

[stauffer327]

I recently switched from an AMD Athlon XP 2400+ to a 2700+ in my system (which is setup with the following):

Asus A7n8x Deluxe Mobo
Athlon XP 2700+ w/ Thermaltake Volcano 9
1024 Cas2.5 Corsair mem.
120 GB Western Digital HD
Sapphire ATI 9500 Pro
Sony 16x DVD
Lite-On 52x CD-RW

When I made the switch I reformated the drive and installed all of the same drivers as before: those for the ATI card, for the NVidia NForce2, NIC drivers, etc. The system seems to be preforming fine, but then it will randomly close programs that are running. This mainly occurs while running programs such as 3DMark 2001SE and Media Player. While running Media Player I will actually receive an error and am forced to close the program. For 3DMark, the program just closes without a BSOD, without any error, just back to windows. I switch the video card out for a different one that I have in another PC (older GeForce3) and the problem continues. I also tried the HD in my other computer and it behaved beautifully. Once I placed everything back into the computer and rebooted I received a "System Failed Memory Test" during the vocal POST. After reboot the error went away and after several reboots I have only received this error once. Is it possible that the memory is bad? Wouldn't I not be able to start any OS if this were the case? Any possible BIOS settings that I may have overlooked? Other than changing the FSB setting, is there anything else that would differ between these two processors? The only thing I can think of is to roll back the drivers to the native ones on XP to try to fix this problem. I have also tried a different IDE cable in fear of something so small being the issue.
When I do have a program such as 3dMark up and running I have left task manager open in the background to monitor the system and have found out that when the program closes, the CPU is at 100% use...is this the problem??? What would cause this? and how do I go about fixing it?

Thanks in advance for you help.

 

[4Ryan6]

Sounds like RAM that won't run in pairs, or bad RAM period if thats a single stick you listed, if its two 512s pull one and try it with just one module, if it works with just one, try the other by itself, if that one works by itself also, your RAM won't run in pairs, its a failure that mainly shows up in the Windows environment.

<b><font color=purple>Details, Details, Its all in the Details, If you need help, Don't leave out the Details.</font color=purple></b>

 

[stauffer327]

Well I tried something similar to what you said to do...I did pull out one stick of ram and everything worked fine...put it back in and the same problems came back...but I did not try the other stick by itself. The system worked perfectly with both sticks (DDR333 or PC2700 if you prefer) so I don't know why changing the processor would mess that up. I've never run into any issues like this with DDR so I am 90 percent possitive that the other stick of RAM has something wrong with it...I will try the other stick on its own though just to be certain. Thanks for the help.