I will try and give you as much details of my problem as i can as briefly as possible.
Problem 1: Multiple, frequent stop messages (blue screens of death).
most frequent are 0xD1 and 0x8E but i have also seen various others including 0x50, 0x24, 0x1A, 0x4E and "c000021a fatal system error". They have sometimes also referred to various files:
win32k.sys
acpi.sys
usbport.sys
tbcwdm.sys
Problem 2: Some programs spontaniously close themselves in an instant. The most frequent culprit is Football Manager 2005 which will just close and return me to my windows desktop within a second. It gives no warning and i can find no patern as to when programs crashes, except they tend to involve significant amounts of data on my hard drive(s).
Problem 3: Various programs can now be unstable. eg Windows media player (and other media players), ULead VideoStudio and dc++. Each may crash and windows will ask me to send an error report. dc++ in particular has its own crash messages and normally will just say "dc++ has crashed".
I am most concerned with Problem 1, but thought i should mention the other 2 problems in case they are relevent.
My computer has ran stably as it is for a long while but gradually it has recently been becoming more and more usntable.
Firstly i can discount any software issue since i have recieved STOP errors while reformatting a hard drive (NOT in windows).
I can also say i have tried 2 different graphics cards * (one agp one pci), i have removed all unnecessary devices (second hard drive, DVD drives, sound card etc) and have tried to eliminite my memory. I have 1 512Mb and 2 128Mb sticks. I have removed the 512Mb stick and seen it crash and i have removed the 128Mb sticks and seen it crash.
*After recovering from one of the stop errors windows asks me to send an error report which to begin with just said some device driver was dodgy. Then it said a graphics device driver. Most recently it says an NVidia Graphics device driver (i have NVidia GeForce 3 Ti200. I do NOT have an NVidia chipset or anything NVidia on my motherboard), though since getting this i still get the random message that it could be any device.
I can reduce the possible causes down to CPU (AMD Athlon XP 1700+), motherboard (Gigabyte GA-7VTXE), hard drive (80Gb western digital special edition), RAM with some confidence. I updated the BIOS to the most recent version and reset it to default values.
I have been in touch with Gigabyte technical support over this matter. Unfortunately the only help they could offer was limited to a lack of power (so i tried a new PSU for a P4 system) and temperature (comparing the temp of the cpu minutes before a crash and when it ran stable a couple of years ago suggests it isnt this).
I'm all out of ideas and have no ideas how i could locate the exact cause of the problem. If anybody knows anything much about the stop messages i have received it would help. I have of course searched google and found some help on the matter, but got no help for cases where lots of different ones accur as in my case. Any help / suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
Thank you in advance,
Andy
Problem 1: Multiple, frequent stop messages (blue screens of death).
most frequent are 0xD1 and 0x8E but i have also seen various others including 0x50, 0x24, 0x1A, 0x4E and "c000021a fatal system error". They have sometimes also referred to various files:
win32k.sys
acpi.sys
usbport.sys
tbcwdm.sys
Problem 2: Some programs spontaniously close themselves in an instant. The most frequent culprit is Football Manager 2005 which will just close and return me to my windows desktop within a second. It gives no warning and i can find no patern as to when programs crashes, except they tend to involve significant amounts of data on my hard drive(s).
Problem 3: Various programs can now be unstable. eg Windows media player (and other media players), ULead VideoStudio and dc++. Each may crash and windows will ask me to send an error report. dc++ in particular has its own crash messages and normally will just say "dc++ has crashed".
I am most concerned with Problem 1, but thought i should mention the other 2 problems in case they are relevent.
My computer has ran stably as it is for a long while but gradually it has recently been becoming more and more usntable.
Firstly i can discount any software issue since i have recieved STOP errors while reformatting a hard drive (NOT in windows).
I can also say i have tried 2 different graphics cards * (one agp one pci), i have removed all unnecessary devices (second hard drive, DVD drives, sound card etc) and have tried to eliminite my memory. I have 1 512Mb and 2 128Mb sticks. I have removed the 512Mb stick and seen it crash and i have removed the 128Mb sticks and seen it crash.
*After recovering from one of the stop errors windows asks me to send an error report which to begin with just said some device driver was dodgy. Then it said a graphics device driver. Most recently it says an NVidia Graphics device driver (i have NVidia GeForce 3 Ti200. I do NOT have an NVidia chipset or anything NVidia on my motherboard), though since getting this i still get the random message that it could be any device.
I can reduce the possible causes down to CPU (AMD Athlon XP 1700+), motherboard (Gigabyte GA-7VTXE), hard drive (80Gb western digital special edition), RAM with some confidence. I updated the BIOS to the most recent version and reset it to default values.
I have been in touch with Gigabyte technical support over this matter. Unfortunately the only help they could offer was limited to a lack of power (so i tried a new PSU for a P4 system) and temperature (comparing the temp of the cpu minutes before a crash and when it ran stable a couple of years ago suggests it isnt this).
I'm all out of ideas and have no ideas how i could locate the exact cause of the problem. If anybody knows anything much about the stop messages i have received it would help. I have of course searched google and found some help on the matter, but got no help for cases where lots of different ones accur as in my case. Any help / suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
Thank you in advance,
Andy