Continuous system crashes, freezes and BSODs

[hademus]

Hi all,

My current PC is 5 years old: Asus A8N-SLi Premium Motherboard, AMD Athlon 3200+ 2.01 processor, 2 x 1 GB RAM, 400 W PSU. During these 5 years, I once upgraded my graphics card to GeForce 9400 GT and sound card to Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Titanium, which worked beautifully. I also have a dual boot system : Windows XP and Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit.

Everything was working perfectly until 3 weeks ago, when my system froze and crashed with a BSOD. I booted in Windows XP where the same problem persisted. To be safe, I removed all extra hardware and ran a memory test (memtest on each chip separately) and a hard disk test (Seatools). As it turned out, one of my 1 GB RAM chips had errors and so did my hard drive.

I then went ahead and bought a new hard drive, and only put in the other 1 GB RAM chip which didn't have any errors. The new installation worked perfectly for 2-3 days. Then the same problem started with more crashes and freezes on both XP and 7, many times at the boot screen itself. I also checked the BIOS which was updated to the latest version, and changed the CMOS jumper and back again to get default BIOS settings. The battery is working perfectly too.

The BSODs seem to indicate a hardware problem but I'm out of ideas what it might be. Could it be a problem with other memory chip although memtest is showing it as error-free? Also it's interesting to note that even though the time in my BIOS is
perfect, the time shown in Windows 7 and XP slows down (goes behind) when I shut down and restart the PC after a few hours.

I have attached the last few memory dumps in the zip file. Maybe you can shed some light into what direction I should take.

Thanks - I am writing this from my laptop

 

[Route44]

The single most important minidump file specifically cited corrupted mermory as your issue.

 

[hademus]

Hi Route44,
Thanks for your reply! Luckily my computer hasn't crashed in the last 24 hours and I'm back on it.

Now here's the problem: My system is 5 years old and requires DDR RAM. Do I risk paying for a new DDR RAM chip, and then find out that the problem was in the memory slot or somewhere else? Also, when I build a new system (hopefully at the beginning of next year), DDR RAM will be useless in the new motherboard.

I'm really confused what to do. Any suggestions (apart from the steps I've already tried) on how I can be 100% sure it's a memory chip problem and nothing else (maybe something in the motherboard)?

Thanks again .

 

[Route44]

At this point I doubt it is your motherboard or your cpu. Find the voltage specs of your RAM and compare it to the voltage setting in your BIOS. Do they match? Keep in mind that on occasion bad RAM has been known to Pass memtest.

I would say that if stability continues just use your system until you can build a new one.

By the way, I have the very same cpu in my second PC and it is running as perfect as the day I got it over 5 years ago.