Possible MOBO issue.

[JoHo22]

So I am running an older rig.
1.6 p4
1 gig ram.
ATI radeon 9700 pro
on a GA-8IRX (gigabyte motherboard)

After a few weeks of having a few performance issues,
my computer seems to choke out alot more than usual.
I havent ruled out the possible fried hard drive,
but before I go throwing money at things without truly knowing the issue,
i thought i might ask for some help.
I think the issue may be the bios of the motherboard.
Though i havent found any chipsets that want to work with my mobo.
someone please help :-(

 

[JoHo22]

Making matters worse,
the pc is restarting on its own while playing battlefield 2 and warcraft 3.
i have never had this problem before.

 

[JoHo22]

This is the technical information i get when it reboots and says i has
recovered from a serious error.

C:\DOCUME~1\ADMINI~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\WER7e70.dir00\Mini112605-05.dmp
C:\DOCUME~1\ADMINI~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\WER7e70.dir00\sysdata.xml

BCCode : 1000008e BCP1 : C000001D BCP2 : 806ECDAA BCP3 : EB507594
BCP4 : 00000000 OSVer : 5_1_2600 SP : 2_0 Product : 256_1

 

[Somniferum]

Do you have any spare parts lying around that you can swap out to try to isolate the problem? Or maybe a friend with a similar rig who is willing to help?

If you think it may be the hard drive, you could download a diagnostic utility from the drive's manufacturer and check it for errors. Western Digital for example as a very good diagnostic utility -- I believe it even works with other vendors' drives.

Non-specific problems like these are often difficult to isolate. If you have any plans to upgrade in your future, you might as well just do it and save yourself the trouble of trying to figure this one out.

 

[o1die]

You can run memtest to check your memory, or try one stick at a time for awhile, and see if the problem goes away. I downloaded catylist 5.11 for my ati card to fix a distorted image problem on my game. If you don't already have it, now's a good time to upgrade to pc3200 while the price is still low. Most older boards will run it, and it will give you more headroom for future upgrades or overclocking.

 

[JoHo22]

its a seagate, im lookinmg for the mem test

 

[Muggy]

I had the exact same problem with AoE III. The comp did not restrt but the game would crash to the desktop and that was the exact error message that I got. So I deleted those files and played again and I had no problems. Kept clearing the Local Settings/Temp folder on every startup and this problem did not recur.