I've got a weird problem where my machine will spontaneously reboot or get "funky" (where I can move my mouse around and highlight icons by clicking on them and get tooltips from the taskbar, but not actually do anything, like open up My Computer or expand the Start Menu or anything else besides hard-reboot), but only after many hours of idle time, as far as I can tell.

e.g. I have had multiple huge marathon sessions of gaming with FEAR and City of Villains (like 6-8 hours?), both of which you would expect to be slamming the hard drive, the RAM, the CPU, the audio card, and the video card, with no problems. However, if I leave my machine on overnight or when I go to work, it is never working correctly when I get back. (It may reboot only 3 hours into idle time when I can play games with no problems for much longer than that).

It's a brand new system - and it's been having this problem the entire time. Reboot/funkiness is 100% reproducable with ~4+ hours of idle time and system has been, say, 99% stable when doing anything else on it (games, 3D modeling applications, other cpu/ram intensive stuff).

Asus a8n-sli premium mobo
AMD athlon64 x2 4400+
2x 1gig sticks of OCZ ram.
Creative X-Fi
Nvidia 7800gt
250 gig SATA Western Digital drive. Actually, SATA2, I think?

Asus probe log reports nothing funny going on with voltages or temps just before the machine goes down.

chkdsk reports no problem with my drives.

This last time it went down it made a minidump, so I followed cpc2004's instructions on reading it and have attached the log here.

Any help would be appreciated, and I am a super newb, so feel free to talk dumb to me. I have not yet tested the RAM, because I don't have a floppy drive and I'd need to dig my CD burner out of the garage , but it would seem that stability while running RAM intensive programs and instability when doing nothing would rule that out, but hey, that's why I'm asking you guys for help.

Thanks!

Ken

Attached Files

debuglog.txt (16.9 KB, 1 views)

Go HERE and follow the instructions for testing your ram, and running a disk check.

If that doesn`t help. Zip 5 or 6 minidumps togethr and post them here. Instructions for doing this can be found in the above thread.

Regards Howard

I will check my RAM and let you all know how that goes. However, it strikes me as weird that I have not had any stability issues while actually doing RAM-intensive tasks (you'd think cutting edge games and 3D modeling/rendering applications and 3DMark would push the RAM).

chkdsk said the disk was fine, but I will run it with /r /f. Do I need to do it on all the various partitions, or can I just run it on the Windows partition?

Just for future information, can anybody tell me what exactly Windows XP is doing when it is idle? I see the HDD LED blink every couple of seconds. It would just be useful to know what Windows does while I am idle, as I suppose it might help narrow down what is causing my crash. Is it doing maintenence, defragging my hard drive, or what? I wasn't connected to the internet, so it wasn't doing an automatic Windows Update or anything, and far as I know I didn't have anything else running in the background aside from various audio/video panels, and the ASUS probe writing a log of my voltages.

I only have one minidump, and I've posted the log in the original post, though I can post the raw dump if that would be more useful. Most of the time Windows becomes "unresponsive" when idle for too long in the way I described earlier, to the point where I am required to push the reset button on the case, as there is no way to get it to soft-reboot.

Thanks for your time,

Ken

yes, you should run the disk check on all your partitions.

Regards Howard

Hard disk was fine, memory was fine.

I disabled my audio card and enabled the onboard audio and that seems to have fixed the problem - checked the computer in the morning after having it on overnight and everything was perfect.

It turns out there is an acknowledged compatibility problem (google "X-Fi nforce4 problems" - actually, it returns a News item right here on techspot from Oct 17, 3 days before I bought my nforce4 motherboard and my X-Fi ) between the Creative X-Fi's and the nforce4 chipset. Some motherboard manufacturers have released BIOS updates to deal with it, and others, like mine (ASUS A8N-SLI Premium) require Creative to replace the card with another, which they will do free of charge if still under warranty.

Thanks for the help!

Thanks for the info.

I`m glad you`ve got your problem solved.

Regards Howard

BTW there are new Nforce chipset drivers now available.

Look HERE for futher info.

Regards Howard