BSOD during game and ebook reading

[Dagorath]

I get a lovely BSOD every time I play Napoleon: Total War at a random interval; it also happens when I'm running Mobipocket. I can't read the darn errors or write them down fast enough before my system reboots, and the pause button doesn't... pause, on my system, for some reason. No idea if this is normal nowadays, not used that key for years...

Anyway.

This has been occurring since I installed Windows 7. Prior to that, my system ran perfectly well (under XP). This is a clean installation.

Initially I had 15 minute boot time followed by random freezes with constant HDD access; swapping the hard drives around so that the biggest (newest, so was slave before) is now primary and installing to a partition on that drive fixed that. I've checked both drives (drive health using the Western Digital apps, full scans with chkdsk, etc); both are fine.

Swapping em around fixed that, and the system runs great - except when it just randomly falls over (very occasionally). It's not occasional if I'm using two applications in particular, though: Napoleon Total War and Mobipocket. When using these, a crash is pretty much inevitable.

I don't know if other games would run fine - I don't have any installed.

I've run memtest: 12 passes, no errors. Also cleaned the system - as in physically - IE contacts on the RAM chips, compressed air for fans, blah blah blah.

Included five minidumps. Help would be much appreciated, thank you.

 

[Route44]

All five minidumps are error 0xA and these are caused by either hardware or drivers.

In every one of your dumps is the same Windows OS driver cited as the cause of your issue: amdk8.sys

There is nothing in the BSOD that would lead me to believe there is a hardware issue. While researching online it appears that this might be a part of Cool and Quiet pertaining to your cpu. Does the BIOS have Cool and Quiet enabled? If so - disable it and see if that helps.


Cool and Quiet is enabled by default on many AMD boards. So if you are comfortable doing so disable it in the BIOS. Many builders do

Cool and Quiet controls the power to the CPU cores so they run cooler and you hopefully do not need the fans spinning at 100% all of the time quieting down the system:

 

[Dagorath]

Thanks, I'll give that a go now.

 

[Route44]

Due to the fact that you installed Windows 7 on already established hardware two other pssibilities may be either a) a BIOS update or b) a possible Windows 7 hotfix.

 

[Dagorath]

That sortof worked, in that it took a lot longer for the system to crash. Played for about 2 and a half hours, but still got the same error/BSOD.

Unfortunately there's no BIOS update for my mainboard since... the stone age or so. It's a fairly cheap MSI board, but hasn't caused me any issues in the past all the same. A K9VGM-V, to be precise.

I've installed all the updates available for Win7, so maybe it's just something that's not been fixed yet?

 

[Route44]

Possible on the no fix. Realizing that a lot of people don't have the cash, but have you considered a) reinstalling XP onh this system and b) building a new system? You already have Windows 7 for a new build.

If you thought about a new build what would be your budget?

Attach those minidumps from your latest BSOds.