Blue Screens and Restarts

[Deathstar1]

Try this:

Right click My Computer > properties > advanced tab > settings button in the Start Up & Recovery field > uncheck automatically restart in the System Failure field.

Next time you get a crash it will give you a stop error/blue screen, make a note of the stop error and tell us what it says.

 

[lav011]

Try this:

Right click My Computer > properties > advanced tab > settings button in the Start Up & Recovery field > uncheck automatically restart in the System Failure field.

Next time you get a crash it will give you a stop error/blue screen, make a note of the stop error and tell us what it says.

Alright, I'm back to report a few things. Was not able to do memtest because I could not find a floppy and my cdrw rom has been broken for months now . Ok so I did what this post said and turned off automatic restart. Turned on a game and waited a while.

Said there is a problem with either my display driver or the adapter, which caused it to stay in an infinate loop.

*** Stop: 0X000000EA(0x85FOO950,0x8690961810XF90ACB4,0x00000001) ATI2dvag

I will post more errors as I get them.

 

[NeXuS1]

It seems thats that vid card or your drivers

 

[lav011]

I am guessing if its driver related its fixable. But I don't think that it could be the drivers because when I first got windows home, I was not getting any blue screens while playing games at first. But after a few hours I got restarts and blue screens again. So if its my card, is there any way to test it to make sure that it is the card. Is there any solution to something like this other then forking out another 180$ for a new card (which is what my Radeon 9800 cost me).

Also to note: I am not sure if this is true but it seems like after installing the Nvidia chipsset drivers the problem got worse.

 

[Jamxx]

I really do think your video card is overheating. Do you have a Shuttle PC? Those are notorious for heating up relatively badly (sometimes). Try taking apart your case (so that the cover is off) with a fan blowing directly on it. See if that helps. If it does, then it is a heat issue.

What drivers do you have for your 9800 Pro? If they're the Catalyst 6.4's, you may want to revert back to the 6.3's.

 

[lav011]

Random restarts are getting worse now. I am starting to believe that it is bad RAM because when world of warcraft gets an error, it always says something like Access violation, memory could not be read in some sector. I got tons of those. Then I'm getting the restarts and the errors come out saying there was a problem with my RAM. The error report says it also and advises me to run microsofts memory diagnosis. I need to go out and buy a floppy disk and test out both RAM cards.

Also, the weather is getting pretty hot now days, my cpu temearture is about 60c when running games. I really hope that its just one problem and not a series of problems like ram, the video card and heat all at the same time. Thank you guys for the help. Is there any other tips or advice?

 

[TRDCorolla1]

The other guys here have some good approach. Here's mine. It's simple and could possibly work. It's tough troubleshooting PCs when you don't know the exact problem. Your blue screen leads me to believe bad RAM at first, but try memtest to test it out or other free utility if you can find them. See how that checks out. If it turns up fine and you've done all the other steps above, then try the simplest things.

Do a complete Temp Internet File cleanup, Cookies, History. You have a lot of movie files, music files, picts, etc? Get those off the hard drive by backing them up onto DVDs. This is tedious work, but you're going to have to do that eventually one of these days.

Uninstall all programs that you are not using or less likely to use. Uninstall the two games that you've been having problems with. Then reinstall them. Perhaps there's conflict with file sharing among the two. I'm thinking if it may be a video card problem, the entire screen will be affected, not just the games. Try getting rid of the drivers and just use plain Windows VGA crappy drivers first. After you got everything removed, run scandisk. Correct errors if any. Then run defrag if you wish. After all that, do a reboot to start out clean.

Now this is tedious and long work, but you got to take it step by step. See how Windows run after all that work. You should be running Windows basic VGA. Now attempt to download new drivers for your video card and install it. Probably ask you to reboot after that. Now make sure you have latest Direct X 9.0c on there. Install one game only and run it.

You may want to check what's in the Task Manager to see if there's anything out of the oridnary that you've never seen before. I check mine alll the time when my system halts or slow down. I just end the process to get rid of it, then it runs at full blast. Go to MSCONFIG to get rid of some startup items that you don't need.