About 3 weeks about I built a new computer for gaming. It ran very well up until yesterday. I had a friend over last night and we were trying to play some games together. Everything went fine until we started playing Medieval 2 Total War, a game that I know my computer should soar through. In that game I started to get lockups that lasted for a few seconds and occurred every few seconds. Thinking nothing of it, I just restarted to see if it would go away and was amazed when Vista wouldn't boot with the error code 0x00000e9.
After much searching I finally did a chkdsk on my Vista partition from XP, which took forever but eventually did boot. I also have 3 other partitions for XP, games, and just storage. I've been doing some cleaning up of my hard drive for the last few hours and about 20 mins ago started a disk clean cycle with the Auslogics tool. It took it literally 20 mins to clear about 8 GB. Maybe it's just me but that seems a little long.
I've also noticed that lockups are still occuring in Firefox for a few seconds at a time. Also just after Auslogics finished, iTunes and Last.fm opened, both of which are supposed to be startup services.
My problem is that I have really no clue where to start with this. I recently overclocked my Q9550 to 3.4 GHz on an Arctic F7P and I also overclocked my Kingston HyperX RAM, which is rated at 1066 anyway, to that speed. I'm not sure if this is a sign of an unstable overclock as I successfully ran Prime95 for just under 20 hours, but that may not mean a whole lot. The heat's not a problem as all my temps are well within the safe zone.
Also, the hard drive I'm working with is a 3-year old WD Caviar 250GB that I stole from my old computer. It hasn't been defragged in awhile and lately there has been a good amount of data, probably in the 10 or more GB range, being written and deleted from it. I'm going to try defragging all of my partitions tonight and see if that helps with the lockups.
As I was thinking about it though I started to realize that this has been going on for a few days now, especially in GTA IV. That game would freeze, albeit with a greater gap between incidents, for a long time before resuming.
There's probably more information that I'm forgetting, but for now that's it. I really have no clue where to start because this computer is only 3 weeks old and really shouldn't be having problems doing ordinary everyday jobs. Sorry for the long post, but if anyone helps it would GREATLY, GREATLY appreciated. Thanks for your time.
P.S. If you want them, my specs are:
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 at 3.4 GHz
Arctic Freezer 7 Pro
Kingston HyperX T1 DDR2-1066 RAM running at 960 MHz
Gigabyte EP45-UD3L
EVGA Geforce GTX 260 Superclocked Edition running at stock
Western Digital Caviar 250 GB 7200 RPM HDD
Corsair 750W PSU
Cooler Master CM690
After much searching I finally did a chkdsk on my Vista partition from XP, which took forever but eventually did boot. I also have 3 other partitions for XP, games, and just storage. I've been doing some cleaning up of my hard drive for the last few hours and about 20 mins ago started a disk clean cycle with the Auslogics tool. It took it literally 20 mins to clear about 8 GB. Maybe it's just me but that seems a little long.
I've also noticed that lockups are still occuring in Firefox for a few seconds at a time. Also just after Auslogics finished, iTunes and Last.fm opened, both of which are supposed to be startup services.
My problem is that I have really no clue where to start with this. I recently overclocked my Q9550 to 3.4 GHz on an Arctic F7P and I also overclocked my Kingston HyperX RAM, which is rated at 1066 anyway, to that speed. I'm not sure if this is a sign of an unstable overclock as I successfully ran Prime95 for just under 20 hours, but that may not mean a whole lot. The heat's not a problem as all my temps are well within the safe zone.
Also, the hard drive I'm working with is a 3-year old WD Caviar 250GB that I stole from my old computer. It hasn't been defragged in awhile and lately there has been a good amount of data, probably in the 10 or more GB range, being written and deleted from it. I'm going to try defragging all of my partitions tonight and see if that helps with the lockups.
As I was thinking about it though I started to realize that this has been going on for a few days now, especially in GTA IV. That game would freeze, albeit with a greater gap between incidents, for a long time before resuming.
There's probably more information that I'm forgetting, but for now that's it. I really have no clue where to start because this computer is only 3 weeks old and really shouldn't be having problems doing ordinary everyday jobs. Sorry for the long post, but if anyone helps it would GREATLY, GREATLY appreciated. Thanks for your time.
P.S. If you want them, my specs are:
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 at 3.4 GHz
Arctic Freezer 7 Pro
Kingston HyperX T1 DDR2-1066 RAM running at 960 MHz
Gigabyte EP45-UD3L
EVGA Geforce GTX 260 Superclocked Edition running at stock
Western Digital Caviar 250 GB 7200 RPM HDD
Corsair 750W PSU
Cooler Master CM690