Howdy

Well I am at my wits end with my pc. BSOD appear at random intervals and I am yet to find the cause. They happen very randomly. My system can restart 3 times a week or 3 times every hour. I've done everything I could and would really appreciate some help because minidumps are Greek to me
The restarts happen more on hot days, but my system doesn’t seem to be overheating.

Specs

Motherboard: colorfull c.nf4x-m2 ver1.4 nforce 4 (Chinese junk)

CPU: AMD athlon AM2 Duel core 4600

Memory: 2 X 1 GB Samsung 800

GPU: xfx nvidia 7950gt 512mb

Hdd: western digital IDE 250Gb
Seagate, (barracuda I think) SATA 160 GB - contains OS
Seagate, (barracuda I think) SATA 500 GB

OS: Windows Xp professional SP2 + updates

Powersuply: 400w Cooler master

Idle system temperatures
Motherboard 24 °C (75 °F)
CPU 38 °C (100 °F)
Aux 27 °C (81 °F)
GPU 43 °C (109 °F)
WDC WD2500JB-00REA0 34 °C (93 °F)
Seagate ST3160812AS 36 °C (97 °F)
Seagate ST3500641AS 40 °C (104 °F)

Blue screens of death I’ve received

DRIVER _IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL --- appears 75% of the time
Drivers usually identified
Atapi.sys
Videoprt.sys
Nv4_mini.sys
IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA –appears 20% of the time

MEMORY_MANAGEMENT – only a few times

BAD_POOL_CALLER – once I can remember

And I once got a rather unique stop error when I tried to install amd dashboard
Something like “IO system verification error in amdtools.sys ECT.”

Last stop error received

DRIVER _IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
Stop : 0x0000001 ,(0x8AF5EA10,0X0000007,0X00000000,0XXbA61EEA)

ATAPI.SYS – ADDRES Ba61e5ea base at BA619000 datestamp 41107b4d


Things I have tried
Updating video card drivers
Updating nforce 4 drivers
Updating Bios
Formatting + reinstalling windows(4times)
Ran memtest on old ram, got no errors- bought new ram with no success
Moved single Dimm around
Ran hundreds of checkdisks
Attempted to use verifier.exe to verify drivers
Bought a new power supply after old one got fried by lightning – even though there was no lightning – old power supply was a 500w microlab
Changed graphics card to ATI X1600- nv4_mini.sys then changes to some ati driver
Removed most of the dust form system case with hairdryer and couton buds
Kicking the living sh*t out of my pc


Things I have not tried
Bashing my pc with a hammer till the rage in me subsides
Installing a clean windows on a different drive – I really don’t want to
Installing Vista

In the attachment is my most recent minidumps and a everest report on everything in my PC

I would really love any help from you amazing internet gurus
*sorry forgot to add restarts seem to happen more when watching video or exiting apps

Just caught your posting as breezing thru.

Have you carried out a full virus and spy/malware check?

First check I do when the occasional blue screen comes up is a boot scan using Avast!
Then a spy/malware check.
Seems the only obvious thing missing from your catalogue of fault finders...
back to you

I've run nod32 scan and a spybot scan. but I suppouse no mallware would survive a format... would it?

Depends on whether the boot sector/MBR was formated as well. This is often reserved in a hard drive partition that the old Fdisk used to remove and format.

How did you reformat, ie., access the hard drive and what program did you use?

booted from windows cd, formated , reinstaled windows

Hardware problem

3 of minidumps are crashed at IRQL x'1c' and it is the symptom of hardware error. Probably the RAM or CPU is faulty. Re-seat the ram to another memory slot. Make sure that your CPU is not overheat.

bought new ram, re-seated individual dimm to every slot. Maybe I should buy some thermal paste for my cpu. Really getting frustrated right about now. Maybe the hard drive is on the frits. Is the oldest one in the system . Will a faulty hard drive cause these problems?

hmmmmm

There is definetly a problem with your graphics card/drivers so attempt to boot the pc minus the GPU (use onboard vga). Do you have a spare motherboard you can attatch your existing hardware to? If so attath RAM, HDD, CPU and test. If all goes well add your videocard and soundcard. I think your problem may lie with your motherboard (onboard chips) but i may be well off the mark.... Give it a try.

good advice, but my motherboard has no onboard vga . I did have a 7900GT that burned out for no reason. Well actually the plastic housing for the fan melted. The manufacture sent me a shiny new 7950Gt > I tried using a Ati card. no Success. The only other motherboard I have is an Intel. So screwed there

*forgot to mention sometimes when I hit power my pc powers up, but nothing else. I have to tap the restart button for it to actually boot. Which I am used to by now because my Microsoft keyboard can magically only work in windows once the restart button has bee tapped (microsoft released a work around but I can't find the damn registry entry I am suppoused to edit)
.

Well reinstalled windows and my pc crashed during sp2 install. I would say I am pretty ****ed. What should I replace, the CPU or motherboard as it must be one of those two who are causing problems.

Refer my previous post, the culprit may be CPU or RAM. You have to find out which componene is faulty. My suggestion is CPU but I am not 100% sure. I don't the culprit is hard disk because hard disk error have another symptoms and thousands of btyes will be corrupted and not only 4 btyes of memory are corrupted.

Post your question at hardware forum. Maybe some hardware experts can find out the culprit