Frequent crashes, freezing, slow, etc.

jscott

Baseband Member
Messages
34
Ok, first off, this is a pretty unstable computer that I have, I admit that. Never buy from Cybersystems. But I've been having many more problems as of late. Also, here are my specs. Sorry for the lack of specific brands, but I have to post this on a laptop.

Asus a8n-sli delux motherboard (something like that, at least)
1024 MBs of Corsair memory
149 gig HDD
geforce 6800gt
AMD 3500+

A long time ago, I was having completely different problems. Long story short, I got some stuff replaced and no longer had the problems. Not too long after, though, I started getting blue screens, the error usually reading IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUEL and, as of late, DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUEL. It has been getting worse, though. Lately, I have had extremely slow start-ups. It takes minutes for me to be able to do anything after I reboot my computer. I figured that this is because I have quite a few programs that start on boot up, like zone alarm, norton, google accelator, etc. I went into msconfig and disabled the unnecessary ones, but it didn't help much.

It got even worse, though. Although it always had taken a long time for me to open programs, it has gotten worse. It is rare that I can open anything large without freezing. Otherwise, it just takes ages.

Now, I've tried going into safe mode to uninstall (for add/remove hardware doesn't work, it always freezes) most of my things, but I get a message that says "Cannot display this mode" in white letters against a black background. So I can't enter safe mode.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't expect any specific answers. But any general ideas of where to start with this? I'd rather not reformat, but if that's what it takes, I suppose I'll have to.

By the way, I'm 95% sure it's not a virus. I've run several virus checks, and the problem hasn't been a sudden thing anyway. It's been slowly building up.
 
Seems to me like faulty memory, so memtest might be a good start, like Mammikoura says.

This seems to be happening even more. Or is it just me?
 
Running memtest right now, so I'll see what that turns up. Anyone have an idea about why I can't display in safe mode, though? If I were able to do that, Memtest would able to do better, I think.

Also, I don't think it's overheating. My CPU was only at 104f when I crashed last, and my system at 95f.
 
Ok, I ran memtest for 9.5 hours, and at 6,700%, 0 errors were found. I did have a lot of background programs running though, since I can't go into safe mode. I'll run it again tommorow for 12 hours and see what comes from that, but I doubt that it'd turn anything new up.
 
Run for Spyware and such. Viruses are not always the big problem.

Get Spybot S&D
 
As crazy as it sounds with the slow computer you have, I would suggest installing both Spybot Search & Destroy and Ad-Aware. What Ad-Aware doesn't catch, SS&D will catch, and vice-versa. This sounds strictly spyware-related, as I had to do a lot of spyware cleaning on another workstation.

Also, I would either stick with the name-brand computers (if you don't want to build a custom) or build a custom with brands everyone knows.
 
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