Hi,
I've been having trouble with my PC, which was built for me by a friend, and the issue appears to be with the RAM. I was hoping someone could advise me on what steps I can take.
The problem is that every so often (sometimes 3 times a day, sometimes once a week, it's very intermitent) my computer will just freeze, seemingly for no reason. When it's about to freeze, my mouse cursor will turn to the blue circle, and for a few seconds I can still move my mouse around, but I can't click anything. After those few seconds, the animation on the mouse cursor stops and I can no longer move the cursor around. Nothing works whatsoever, I've tried opening task manager, alt+tabbing between programs etc but it's just completely frozen.
As I said, this problem is intermitent - the computer has been fine for a week or so at a time, but sometimes this will happen 3 or 4 times in a day. I've tried leaving the computer for up to 3 hours after it froze to see whether it would recover (had some unsaved work that I was desperate to keep lol) but it just stayed the same.
This has been happening ever since the computer was built about 4 months ago, and I've tried to look for patterns which might be causing it, but I haven't found any. Sometimes it happens within a minute of Windows starting up, other times my computer can be on for 12 hours without it happening, playing FIFA 12 which most likely uses a lot of resources. It seems to be completely random.
There was once, but only once, where rather than just freezing up a BSOD appeared, which I hope may be crucial to diagnosing the problem. The error in the BSOD was "page_fault_in_nonpaged_area" - from googling that error, it seems to be consistent with the freezing which keeps happening, and seems to be related to the RAM.
I spoke to my friend who built my computer, who advised me to check the BIOS settings for the RAM timings and voltage. I got these from the manufacturers website, but there only appears to be a setting for 3 out of the 4 timings (TRCD, TRP and TRAS, I can't see a setting for CAS) and I can't see anywhere to enter the voltage. All of the settings were set to 'Auto', and I changed the 3 which I could find to match the timings on the manufacturers website, but the issue remains.
Any advice on what else I could try?
My computer details are:
Procesor - AMD Phenom II X4 955 3.21 Ghz
Motherboard - Asus M4A88T-M
Graphics - Radeon HD 6870 1GB
Power Supply - ModXStream-Pro 600W
RAM - Corsair VengeanceLP DDR3 8GB (2 x 4GB)
OS - Windows 7 64 Bit
I've been having trouble with my PC, which was built for me by a friend, and the issue appears to be with the RAM. I was hoping someone could advise me on what steps I can take.
The problem is that every so often (sometimes 3 times a day, sometimes once a week, it's very intermitent) my computer will just freeze, seemingly for no reason. When it's about to freeze, my mouse cursor will turn to the blue circle, and for a few seconds I can still move my mouse around, but I can't click anything. After those few seconds, the animation on the mouse cursor stops and I can no longer move the cursor around. Nothing works whatsoever, I've tried opening task manager, alt+tabbing between programs etc but it's just completely frozen.
As I said, this problem is intermitent - the computer has been fine for a week or so at a time, but sometimes this will happen 3 or 4 times in a day. I've tried leaving the computer for up to 3 hours after it froze to see whether it would recover (had some unsaved work that I was desperate to keep lol) but it just stayed the same.
This has been happening ever since the computer was built about 4 months ago, and I've tried to look for patterns which might be causing it, but I haven't found any. Sometimes it happens within a minute of Windows starting up, other times my computer can be on for 12 hours without it happening, playing FIFA 12 which most likely uses a lot of resources. It seems to be completely random.
There was once, but only once, where rather than just freezing up a BSOD appeared, which I hope may be crucial to diagnosing the problem. The error in the BSOD was "page_fault_in_nonpaged_area" - from googling that error, it seems to be consistent with the freezing which keeps happening, and seems to be related to the RAM.
I spoke to my friend who built my computer, who advised me to check the BIOS settings for the RAM timings and voltage. I got these from the manufacturers website, but there only appears to be a setting for 3 out of the 4 timings (TRCD, TRP and TRAS, I can't see a setting for CAS) and I can't see anywhere to enter the voltage. All of the settings were set to 'Auto', and I changed the 3 which I could find to match the timings on the manufacturers website, but the issue remains.
Any advice on what else I could try?
My computer details are:
Procesor - AMD Phenom II X4 955 3.21 Ghz
Motherboard - Asus M4A88T-M
Graphics - Radeon HD 6870 1GB
Power Supply - ModXStream-Pro 600W
RAM - Corsair VengeanceLP DDR3 8GB (2 x 4GB)
OS - Windows 7 64 Bit
