MSI RS480M2
AMD Athlon 64 3500+
1GB OCZ DDR400 PC3200
80GB Seagate SATA 3.0Gbps
250GB Maxtor ATA/133
80GB Maxtor ATA/133
NEC ND-1300A DVD+-RW
BFG 6600 GT OC

Windows XP Pro SP2 + all updates

I decided to bring this computer back from the depths of "dead computer land" a few days ago. It installed very smoothly, no issues. I grabbed all the latest driver updates from MSI and nVidia.

It has all of a sudden began doing random restarts. They will occur within a half-hour of starting the computer up. All of a sudden the screen will go black, and the computer will bring up BIOS (no BSOD).

In the past few minutes it began to hang up randomly.

Here are my minidump files.

Hello and welcome to Techspot.

Unfortunately, your zip files are corrupted.

You can attach the minidump files themselves.

Regards Howard :wave: :wave:

Sorry, I was using PPMd compression and I forgot that winrar didn't open those files.

Here they are au natural.

Also, I am running chkdsk/r on my main drive right now.

EDIT: Checkdisk did not find any errors.

2 minidumps crash at CLASSPNP.SYS and have a bugcheck of D1.

2 minidumps crash with hardware and have bugchecks of 50 and 7F.

1 minidumps crashes at win32k.sys and has a bugcheck of 8E.

Due to the random nature of your crashes, I suspect some kind of hardware problem.

Possibly a ram problem.

If your system is overclocked, reset it to the default settings.

Go HERE and follow the instructions for troubleshooting BSOD`s

Regards Howard

I ran memtest for 33 passes overnight. It came back with 4 errors:

2 in pass 5 (one at 993.5mb, one at 1008.0mb)
2 in pass 33 (one in 0.3mb, one in 0.5mb)

Is this normal or do I have bad RAM?

Any errors in memtest aren`t a good sign. However, like I said earlier, if any part of your system is overclocked, then that in itself can lead to stability issues and can affect your ram and cause errors in memtest.

Regards Howard

It is not overclocked at all. In fact, the board doesn't even support overclocking, and I don't use clockgen.

The RAM is OCZ value RAM, which has worked very well for me. I got some of their performance RAM, but that is dieing and on RMA. Well, I guess I will have to wait till my performance RAM comes back in.

I just ran memtest on my RAM. Here are the results

Stick 1 in 1st socket: Ran memtest for 3 hours; no errors
Stick 2 in 1st socket: Ran memtest for 3 hours; no errors
Stick 1 & 2 in 3rd and 4th sockets: Ran memtest for 3 hours; multiple errors
Stick 1 & 2 in 1st and 2nd sockets: Ran memtest overnight; multiple errors.

What's wrong? Why won't it work without errors in dual channel mode?

That my friend is a question I simply don`t have a satisfactory answer to.

All I can think, is it`s caused by a ram incompatibility with your mobo. Some mobo`s are very picky when it comes to ram, especially when trying to run ram in dual channel mode.

Check your mobo manufacturers website for compatible ram. Also check in your bios and see if you can relax the ram timings a little.

Regards Howard