Originally posted by: DarkManX4lf
two weeks ago i was running vista and these problems happened then i went down to stock speeds and the problems still happened, a week later i get rid of vista and use xp and the problems started to happen there to (where it never happened before), i drop in the new psu and the freezing doesnt not happen so often in both vista and xp, but yet it still freezes.
but i havent ruled out the hardware problem
Originally posted by: DarkManX4lf
yeah higher temps are normal for dual cores 50c on load is fine.
My comp just froze while watching a video on youtube, it froze last night while watching a video on WMP, and it froze again while moving the mouse around...the only hardware I can think of that was installed prior to the freezing problems is my Samasung SH-S182M cd/dvd burner and maybe the logitech quickcam pro 5000?
Are you still having problems with intermittent freezes? At the time I didn't give much thought to your posts since I wasn't having similar issues. But, for about the past week and a half, now I am.
I've done quite a bit of troubleshooting - swapping out PSU's (and now back to the one I originally was using), running the Windows memory tester, running Driver Verifier, etc. I came to several conclusions along the way, not all of which can be correct.
Specifically, I thought I was having problems with either a failing hard drive, controller, or the drivers for it. I could reproduce a crash with 100% certainty by doing a ~15GB file copy operation between two drives, and this happened in either Vista or XP (Vista would freeze, XP would BSOD with various messages). This seemed to indicate a hardware problem for sure, but then I did more testing and noticed that the crashing NEVER occurred under Safe Mode (in Vista). In addition, I ran full scans of all my hard drives and they found nothing other than minor fixable file system issues (no doubt due to the system crashing unexpectedly).
So then I thought it was a driver thing. But then I ran Driver Verifier for a while and it threw out several "BUGCODE_USB_DRIVER" BSOD's, which I thought was very strange because I was only using the USB drivers provided with Windows Vista. One of them seemed to indicate that there was a CRC error either on my flash drive (which I use for ReadyBoost) or on one of my hard drives, I couldn't tell which. Now, in retrospect this almost makes sense because ReadyBoost doesn't work in Safe Mode, which could explain that there were no crashes in Safe Mode. But wait, there's no ReadyBoost in XP either and I still got crashes there.
So I thought my USB controller was dying or didn't have enough power or something, so I played "Musical USB ports" with all my devices, to no avail. So last night I realized that I was still using my backup power supply (one that I had determined to be somewhat flaky back when I was using it on an Athlon XP system, or so I thought). I switched back to the original one, and things seem to have improved, but not 100% (and of course, the freezes started in the first place when I was using this PSU, not the backup).
So far, I have gotten only one freeze since swapping this PSU back in, and after that freeze I moved my flash drive over to my LCD's powered USB hub, and so far everything's working (no crashes with lots of I/O, gaming etc.). Of course, this was only about an hour ago so who knows if I'm still headed for another unpredictable crash. I also lowered my HTT multiplier to 3x (I'm running 260HTT so my previous 4x would have put me slightly over 1000MHz, even though I've had no problems with that in the past). In addition I set SATA Driving to "Strong" even though I don't really know what that means, this was a day or two ago when I was under the impression that I was having hard drive/controller issues specifically.
(As part of my troubleshooting process I also rolled back from BIOS 2.30 to 2.10, didn't seem to help as far as I could tell.) The only thing that has changed in my PC in the past month, hardware-wise, is the addition of 768MB (512+256) of PC2700 RAM (I already had 2x512 PC3200). So now I'm running it all at a 133MHz memory divider for an effective speed of 173MHz (ever so slightly overclocking the PC2700, but RAM voltage is bumped to "High" too). Also, I've still received these crashes at stock CPU speed so I've all but eliminated my overclock as the source of these problems.
As you may be able to tell by how scatterbrained this post is, I've spent over a week troubleshooting this and thought I've found the cause several times, but in all honesty I have no f****** idea what's going on.
Please do let me know if you're still having these kind of issues (and what, if anything, is common to all of them). Perhaps we might be able to troubleshoot them more effectively with more information.
Also, the last thing I wanted to ask you - how long have you had your board? I've had mine since November 2005 so it's probably one of the very first hardware revisions. In reading the OCW Forums I got the idea that perhaps that could be a cause (compared to other people running newer mobo hardware revisions), but that's just another one of many theories...
Edit: As I expected, I got another freeze not 30 minutes after posting this (while trying to load a save game in Unreal, even though I already just loaded a few with no issues). Now I'm disabling ReadyBoost to see if that has any effect (and I doubt it will....)