XP Pro/MCE help please....

[Fallen Kell]

Well, my luck and XP just do not go together. This is now my second try on a completely different/new system at using XP Pro. At first what I was experiencing was a periodic crash, which I first thought might be heat related (usually occured when playing games). Then one time after the crash during reboot, it hung. I managed to get it into safe mode and then tried to reboot again and it came up fine.

Well the periodic crash while gaming occured again later and this time when it started booting, it rebooted itself before fully comming up. It then booted fine. This happened a few more times, and then one time after doing the reboot, it hung again during boot. I got into safe mode again and then tried to boot normally. System hung again during the boot (same exact way as before). Well, I go back into safe mode and do a system restore, reboot. System still hangs. Try an even earlier system restore, reboot, still hangs. Poped in my windows cd, and did a re-install (while keeping existing data, so it basically reloads the core OS file). Upon reboot, system STILL hangs.

So now I am left with formating the OS partition and doing a complete install from scratch... I havn't tried this yet since I wanted to ask here if there is something else I should try. I have up-to-date virus protection (Norton AV), do not use Outlook or IE, and have both spybot and adaware, so I know that the system itself does not have anything on it that shouldn't be there...

The system is the one in my sig if you are looking for hardware details.

 

[Night201]

Is this a new system? Sounds like your memory timings could be off or something. I would try going into your BIOS and resetting it (the BIOS) to it's default settings. If it works, test it for a day or so...then make adjustments from there.

 

[Fallen Kell]

hmmm... I will give that a shot. Yes it is a new system. It was fairly stable the first day or two (made it thru my normal burn in of Prime95 for 24 hours).

I will see what I can do about the memory timings, but I do not believe I changed them aside from auto-detect which uses the spd timings on the chips themselves (although these are the redline chips, so I wonder if it expects the higher voltage at the spd settings....).

 

[Fallen Kell]

Well, I wiped the disk and started again. I managed to get the OS installed but the system is completely unstable, crashes within 5-20 minutes. I can not even finish loading up drivers as it consistantly crashes when loading the driver for my Haupauge 500-MCE dual tuner.

So I was finally thinking it had to be hardware related, most likely RAM, so I decided to pop in a Knoppix CD and run some memtest. Well, memtest ran absolutely fine for 6 hours straight looping... It also was stable playing games, surfing web, etc. So now I know my hardware is perfectly fine, so I am left with Windows and/or hardware drivers being the problem...

Any ideas?

 

[sourceninja]

assuming you blue screen and are getting irq errors?

If you have any pci cards, try changing what slot they are in. It sounds dumb, but i've seen it work.