Stupid windows XP

[Vicious]

I got my new comp, 4 gigs of ram, 2 256 ddr3 vid cards, AM2 Asus motherboard, AMD 3.0 ghz (overclocked) duo core, but... for some reason im having trouble installing windows and its really pissing me off... My comp shuts off around every 10 minutes randomly.. for some reason i think it has something to do with the drivers, because it wont install them without an error message... any ideas?

[keaton20]

Overheating or power issue maybe?

[Vicious]

nope, i got a crazy power supply and liquid cooling, i have the temp good...

[heman]

a friend had the same problem turn out it was the mouther board when where first looking at it we figged it was heat, motherboard or hard drive it this 1 was the mother board

[IcePROject]

I had that same problem and it was my ram that burned ... try running memtest-86 .

[Melkorus]

first off, downclock your PC to regular speed, everything, and see if it's stable, if so, than you found your problem: overclocking.

Use Prime 95 to test your system for full stability. (run "BLEND" torture test for 12+ hours, if you don't get any errors you should be good, if you get even one error, you got a problem).

2nd, like ice project suggested, check your memory, memtest86 is the best. What I would really suggest is to take out 2 of the sticks and try with only 2. That alone could be the source of your problem, maybe some of the RAM sockets are bad (like a lot of PCI slots), but who knows. If you get too many msges in memtest (run loops of test 5 and 6 for best results), try testing your RAM modules individually, that way you can isolate if there is any bad sticks. Also, maybe test them in different sockets, perhaps some of the sockets on the motherboard are bad as well...tho not likely.

I highly doubt it's driver issue, seems more like hardware problem to me. Let us know what you tried and what were the results.

Question: When you right click on "My Computer" and select properties, how much RAM does it show that you have?

[Vicious]

Well the specifics are correct so its showing so RAM isnt the problem, Ill see if I cant run this "blend" thing you speak of, Ill tell you how that goes when Im done. Thanks for the assistance

Edit: And how do I go about doing that? <-- The blend command)

[Melkorus]

download and install Prime 95. Run Prime 95. Go to FILE>STOP. to stop that generic test which I never understood what the purpose was.

Go to OPTIONS>TORTURE TEST new window will pop up, you will have few options there and one of the options will be "BLEND".


Side note: You can run two instances of Prime 95. Just Copy and Paste installation folder of Prime 95 and run another prime 95 prog from there. This is good for people who have dual core CPUs, like yourself. You can go to ADVANCED>AFFINITY and set each instance of the program to certain core (one set to 0 and other one set to 1). This will give you the best results and stress test your CPU to the max.

If you do end up using two prime 95s at the same time, you have to make sure you change amount of RAM each program will test. For that you would have to use "CUSTOM" option and manually set amount of "Memory to use". You don't want to use more than 3/4 of your total memory on "both" instances of prime 95 (total memory RECOGNIZED BY YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM). If you have 4GBs of RAM, setting 1.5GB to be used with each program would be your ideal amount. Too much is worse than too little since it will result in your PC hanging on you, guaranteed.

Blah, I don't know if I make any sense, I probably don't especially if you never used Prime 95, but if you do have a problem we can go through this step by step.

EDIT: If your PC freezes, that means you have hit critical error. It could be caused by RAM or CPU or both. Now if you are certain that it's not your RAM (and you can never be certain, my RAM is giving me errors and is unstable at STOCK settings, so I had to downclock them due to issues with my motherboard and that particular RAM, you need to run Memtest bro, trust me) than it's your CPU.

EDIT 2: Ummm.... did I get ahead of myself.....you can't install windows xp at all can you?

[Rohanna]

I had a similiar problem....turned out I had corrupted files in a partition and no hard disk to reinstall...I aquired a new version of windows that seemed to work...but the problem was an encrypted file that embedded itself in muliplt locations all named as Windows files...I got hacked! Anywho, the file would not allow me to update my drivers correctly...I know sometimes when we get new pc's we neglect puttin up our firewalls and stuff ebfore going on the net just to chk performance.. make sure you didnt get a virus or trojan.. run ewido to double chk your system.

[Vicious]

Sweet man, thanks for the help. And yah, I got windows installed to where I can get to my desktop and download prime, but I feel that it didnt install correctly due to the suddent turn offs and the fact that I had to download it about 10 times to get it to work, each time comming up with a different error until 1 time it just worked... but now it shuts off, reboots and goes to a blue critical error screen, but hopefully it wont shut off in the middle of prime, we will see. I will tell you how it works out, hopefully i can tell you through my new comp!