My self-built desktop PC frequently freezes/crashes after working flawlessly for 18 months. Usually, it will freeze for a minute or two after which I will regain control for a couple seconds, then it will freeze again and eventually crash to a blue screen error. The most common by far is "kernel data inpage error," but I have also seen "kernel stack inpage error" and "machine check exception."
Upon rebooting, the computer usually hangs at "detecting IDE drives" immediately after start. Other times it just plain fails to boot from the hard disk and attempts to boot using some NVIDIA Boot Agent. Resetting the CMOS using the jumper always gets me back on, but only for a few hours (tops) of user time.
It seems to me like the crashes happen mostly when I'm running what I think are RAM-intensive applications (iTunes, Google Earth, watching videos on YouTube with Internet Explorer) but I've had plenty of crashes while none of those were running. In fact, while attempting to post this thread the first time, it crashed only running Outlook and with IE on this page. Upon reboot, it froze for a minute almost right away.
Western Digital's disk diagnostic tool finds no problems with either of my internal hard disks nor my external drive. I have tried defragging the paging file (deactivating it, rebooting, defragging, then reactivating it) but that didn't solve the problem. I eventually gave up and did a clean install of Windows and bought a floppy drive so I could update the BIOS. I also updated every driver I could think of, but to no avail.
Before the clean install of Windows, before I knew about resetting the CMOS, I would boot from the Windows CD and run the disk repair utility. The first time or two it would find errors and repair them, but then it found errors it said it could not repair and I wiped the hard drive as stated before.
That is all the information I can think of. My computer specs are below. I'm absolutely desparate for help at this point, since I've been wrestling with this problem off and on for over 6 months. Thanks in advance for your advice.
OS - Windows XP SP3
Mobo - eVGA NVIDIA nForce 680i (P33 BIOS)
CPU - Intel Core2Duo E6600 2.4GHz
HD - 2x WD Raptor 150GB SATA + WD MyBook 250GB external
RAM - Corsair Dominator 2x 1GB DDR2 1066
GPU - NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS
Removables - DVD-RW, DVD-ROM, 3.5 inch floppy
Upon rebooting, the computer usually hangs at "detecting IDE drives" immediately after start. Other times it just plain fails to boot from the hard disk and attempts to boot using some NVIDIA Boot Agent. Resetting the CMOS using the jumper always gets me back on, but only for a few hours (tops) of user time.
It seems to me like the crashes happen mostly when I'm running what I think are RAM-intensive applications (iTunes, Google Earth, watching videos on YouTube with Internet Explorer) but I've had plenty of crashes while none of those were running. In fact, while attempting to post this thread the first time, it crashed only running Outlook and with IE on this page. Upon reboot, it froze for a minute almost right away.
Western Digital's disk diagnostic tool finds no problems with either of my internal hard disks nor my external drive. I have tried defragging the paging file (deactivating it, rebooting, defragging, then reactivating it) but that didn't solve the problem. I eventually gave up and did a clean install of Windows and bought a floppy drive so I could update the BIOS. I also updated every driver I could think of, but to no avail.
Before the clean install of Windows, before I knew about resetting the CMOS, I would boot from the Windows CD and run the disk repair utility. The first time or two it would find errors and repair them, but then it found errors it said it could not repair and I wiped the hard drive as stated before.
That is all the information I can think of. My computer specs are below. I'm absolutely desparate for help at this point, since I've been wrestling with this problem off and on for over 6 months. Thanks in advance for your advice.
OS - Windows XP SP3
Mobo - eVGA NVIDIA nForce 680i (P33 BIOS)
CPU - Intel Core2Duo E6600 2.4GHz
HD - 2x WD Raptor 150GB SATA + WD MyBook 250GB external
RAM - Corsair Dominator 2x 1GB DDR2 1066
GPU - NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS
Removables - DVD-RW, DVD-ROM, 3.5 inch floppy