Best way to test for system instability?

Entity

Lifer
Oct 11, 1999
10,090
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I know about running Prime95, etc., to torture test machines, but I'm trying to find out what the specific instability on my computer is.

I've got the following setup:

MSI 845PE Max2
3.06ghz P4 (w/HT)
1gb (PC2100 I think)
Radeon 8500
Freshly ghosted install of XP, all updates.

Every now and then (randomly -- the problem never seems to be consistent), my computer will just reboot. Windows, of course, error reports it as a "device driver" issue. How can I actually pinpoint what the problem is?

Rob
 

LemonHerbWRX

Member
Feb 18, 2004
146
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The reboot is basically a blue screen, what you want to do is go into system properties under the advanced tab an click the startup and recovery button and then uncheck automatically reboot. Now instead of the reboot you get a blue screen, you can see information on what driver or file is causeing it. That will give you a better chance at fixing your problem
 

Smileymcsmiles

Junior Member
Jul 6, 2002
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The problem may be with your RAM. I had the same issue with my PC. I simply made adjustments to the timing of the RAM instead of running it @ SPD and bumped up the voltage one notch, the problem went away. i hope this helps. Also, most BSOD's in windows are driver related. Have you updated your video card drivers lately? You may want to take all of your addon cards and just have the necessities to run your box. You can troubleshoot from there.
 

Texun

Platinum Member
Oct 21, 2001
2,058
1
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Got Memtest? Also worth mentioning is a small app that I don't see much of. It's called Burn In Test Pro (Bitpro). If at some point you decide to stress individual components like cpu, memory, etc. you can dial in the stress level for subsystems either individually or all set to 11and let it burn. Load them one at a time and see what fails.
rolleye.gif
 

BioSs

Senior member
Oct 6, 2003
689
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Also, if you running Dual Channel, make sure you have match pair of same brand and same ram chip. I was going alot blue screen with error when i didn't realize i was runing the same brand but with diffent ram chp on it. So, hope this may help.
 

loic2003

Diamond Member
Sep 14, 2003
3,844
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Try SiSoft sandra. It can benchmark certain components of your machine, or you could run the 'Burn-in wizard' that repeatedly benchmarks whatever you tell it to to see if it's stable under very high loads.....
 
Aug 27, 2002
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and if all the above tests pass ok, you might try uninstalling all your devices from device manager, restarting your computer, going into the bios and resetting the plug and pray, and re-load all your drivers from disk again.