Odd set of symptoms

[junja]

Just for the record, a set of symptoms on a new machine
which stumped me over a period of months, none of them
occurring regularly enough to prevent use of the computer :
* bsods
* slow booting
* memory dumps - with mention of a different driver each
time
* refusal to boot, stopping at the bios screen or at a black
one with a cursor, requiring a hard reset
* the Windows flash screen showing extremely dimly while
booting very slowly - you could easily miss the "Windows"
text if not paying attention
* going away for a period of a minute or 2, not long after
booting to xp, - no activity, no response to mouse or cursor -
then working fine the rest of the day
* regular long wait while closing down at "Closing Windows"
stage
I did all the usual tests - as outlined by Julio.
The culprit ?
A hard disk, actually an Intel ssd. I replaced that and the
troubles stopped.
Until, ironically, I sat down to write this - when another
bsod occurred. Just hope that's an isolated case.

 

[Route44]

Attach that last BSOD minidump file. As for Intel SSDs, yeah, they had issues but from what I have been reading Intel was supposed to have fixed it.

 

[junja]

I got mine in August 2010 - so perhaps before the fix.

 

[junja]

> Attach that last BSOD minidump file.

Here it is

 

[Route44]

Your minidump file cited the Microsoft OS driver scisport.sys as the problem but the thing with OS drivers is they are usually not the issue. If you have more recent minidumps please attach them in your next post.

 

[junja]

Thanks

Thanks.
There were so many of them I deleted them.
It was a different driver every time - leading me to suspect the problem lay elsewhere. But I never thought it could be a hard disk giving so many and varied symptoms.
Now that the disk is new, the problems have gone away - except for that one-off.

 

[junja]

Update

Nearly a year on and the problems are still there
intermittently, though not quite the same as before.
The odd one now is that parts of the machine can stop
working, leaving the rest working fine.
During a webinar, the sound and video can
continue normally, the clock update every second
and the cursor move okay but cursor clicks and
keyboard don't work.
While the internet connection works, copying files
over the network doesn't.

This can happen after anything from 1 to 6 hours
working. Nothing for it then but a hard reboot.
After which it can go the rest of the day without a hitch.

I've now changed the power supply (twice), the hard disk,
the kvm, the motherboard (twice), added a video card,
updated the bios .. And of course I've used memtest on the
memory - on both chips together and singly.

After a change in the hardware, things often seem to
improve - but not for long.

I'm stumped. Pondering getting a barebone and
testing each part on that.

For the record:
- ASUSTeK M4N68T-M-V2
- Amd Sempron 140
- Corsair Value Select 2 Gb DDR3-SDRAM
- ATI Radeon hd 5450
- Cooler Master Elite Power 400W
- APC Essential SurgeArrest
- Samsung SpinPoint F4
- D-Link KVM 2KU
- Win XP

 

[Route44]

Check your motherboard and see if there are any bulging capacitors.

 

[junja]

Check your motherboard and see if there are any bulging capacitors.

Thanks. I'd done that.

I was wrong in my last post. The problems continued.
But now they're solved - I think.
It was a bad connector on a sata cable.
(Which also explains why things always seemed to work better
after I opened it up and changed something. I probably
reseated the connector - which then made a good connection for
a few days before loosening again.)
Moral - when you think you've changed "everything", ask
yourself what hasn't yet been changed.