My computer just....stopped.

[The Sly Syl]

My rig's about a year old now, and its been working fine and wonderfully up till now.

I went to a local LAN party last night, and things were going well, of course, having a bunch of guys and computers in a room makes the room a bit warm. My computer was getting up to around 52-53 celsius, but thats not too bad. (It's normal top temp is around 49)

I have the best computer in the room, so i was the one hosting all the games.

I was hosting a game of HL-2: Deathmatch, and i got the blue screen error:
IRQL LESS THAN OR EQUAL.

I've seen that before (overclocked too much) and i lowered the timings on my ram and carried on.

Got another blue screen.
"BAD SPOOL HEADER" (or something very close to that)

This is more bluescreens than i've had in months, so i just let my computer idle for a bit before trying again. I tried googling "BAD SPOOL HEADER", but i think that i must have gotten the name wrong, as i got very few results.

Turned it on, got another "BAD SPOOL HEADER" crash as i was attempting to load HL2: DM.

tried resetting again - my BIOS wouldn't come up. I was getting some weird screen about AWDFLASH trying to find something in my CD drive, but being unsuccessful. (I then removed my Civ IV CD) then it attempted to read my floppy drive, and was unsuccessful.

I did a hard shut-off of the computer, as nothing else would work.

Turned it on again, same thing, odd screen talking about AWDFLASH... turned it off.

Opened the side, checked all the connections inside the case, made sure everything was getting power, jumbled a few wires that could have been loose.

Turned the computer on, the Asus flash screen showed up fine, it booted into windows fine, i got on aim, firefox, tried to find a little help, it worked fine. Tried to load HL2M...

and then the screen stopped recieving data.

Turned pitch black, just with the little blinking "I'm on, but nothing is happening" LED flashing.

Turned the computer off, and since then, i can't get any sort of video output to my monitor. I've tried turning it off/on multiple times, I reset the bios using the jumpers, i've tried changing with nports i have things plugged into, turned off the majority of my case fans, i've attempted to use a different monitor, but no matter what, i can't get any sort of image. Which is a problem, because i don't know if my computer is even booting up or not.

Any idea's where to start to tackle this problem? (My computer stats are in my sig) - It wasn't running overclocked at all when all of this happened, i turned off the videocard overclocking and processer overclocking when i feared it was getting a little hot.

As of last night, my computer has been completely virus/spyware free for as long as it's been in existance, and noone else on the network had any sort of virii or problems.


I think my first course of action is going to be trying to find someone else with a PCI-E videocard and seeing if i can get an image of some sort....

 

[The Sly Syl]

I tried a friends PCI-E 6600GT in it, no picture either. So i'm guessing it has to be the motherboard.

Wouldn't using the hard-reset on the bios fix my problem if it was a bad bios? (stupid jumper thingy)

I looked around the board,couldn't see any signs of damage and i didn't see any warping or anything. Motherboard is in the same position it's been in since I had to replace my chipset fan. (Early summer) and i haven't had any trouble since then.

I don't think its screwed in too tight, i checked all my screws and they were somewhat loose, none were hard to turn. I know not to screw them in tightly.

Noone here has a PCI videocard, nor do i know anyone who does, so i can't check if the PCI-E port went bad... maybe i could attempt putting the videocard into the second PCI-E slot, though i don't think it's made to work that way.

....I might just have to buy a new motherboard, i wish i could troubleshoot the rest of my parts, but i'm not having the time to do that right now. (I'm not going to start lobotomizing other peoples computers to check all of my parts one by one)

My overclocks were minor and well within the bounds that the board and parts allowed. (2.2ghz to 2.4ghz, default is 200x11, i was set at 218x11, ram timings were 2-2-2-5, which is what the chips are supposed to be) Anyway, i set it all back to default before this happened.


I've been lanning this thing since the first few days i've had it, i've been moving it around every single weekend before i went off to college. I wasn't any rougher with it this time than i normally am (which, at the most extreme, is carrying it up/down stairs - which i didn't even have to do this time) but, i guess all that wear might have finally given in.... though i hope that's not it.