Having General problems with my PC, need help

[Therk]

Recently (last 3 months or so) I've been having some problems with my PC. Most games run fine however they have a mild 'stutter' every 5 - 10 seconds or so. Just today when watching a high quality video in fullscreen it started chugging, just like the games and then I got the Memory could not be 'read' error and the application closed down. Ive gotten this in a few games, Half Life 2, Rainbowsix Vegas and S.T.A.L.K.E.R are a couple of examples. Basically I just want to determine what is wrong, if its software or hardware and which component/software it is, thanks.

Specs:

A64 3200+
Nvidia 6800GS
1 gig ram

 

[ch33zw1z]

Start with testing system stability. good apps: memtest86, prime95, sandra. memtest is going to test your memory, if it returns any errors that's where you want to start troubleshooting. If all your hardware tests return ok, next is checking for driver problems.

 

[Captante]

The most likely cause is either bad RAM or a problem with a driver ... as already suggested you should start by running Memtest86 & if you have changed any drivers recently you should consider rolling them back to the previous version.

 

[Therk]

Update: Now MOST of my games hitch/stutter every 5 seconds or so and it is REALLY irritating...

 

[Therk]

I just got the Sandra program but I'm not sure which tests I should look at...

Edit: I did this test where I compared my Seagte SATA 200gb drive to the same 250gb and 300gb drives and mine had quite a smaller "Drive Index"

The others ranged from 73 - 77mb/s while mine was only at 59mb/s

 

[oynaz]

Sounds like a malware infestation