My Computer Is Dying...
moguai
Join Date: 2002-11-14 Member: 8623Members
Join Date: 2002-11-14 Member: 8623Members
in Tech Support
<div class="IPBDescription">Need some advice here:</div> Alright, heres the story. My comptuer was working fine till 2 weekends ago, when I came home after a suprise (and strong) storm and found my computer dead (no video to the screen, wouldnt respond to reset button, HD active light on steady). I think it might have gotten a lightning zap. This was the start of my problems: HL and Q3 and Battlefield gave me "Program Error(s)" and crashed. I started to get bluescreens, and flakiness in windows. After replacing the Ethernet card and mouse, it seemed to be working. Last weekend I went to my friends house to lan, and it started doing it again. I got fed up and formatted, and my friend gave me 2x sticks of 256 ddr pc2100. It did fine all weekend throughout constant Generals and CS, tho generals crashed twice, but only after many hours of playing.
So I come home sunday, and here come the problems. Bluescreens and game crashes get more frequent. I format, to no avail. I format again after it absolutely refuses to load windows. The crashes and bluescreens keep coming. It booted once into VGA for no apparant reason (I reinstalled my dets and it was fine). During a game of HL I pressed esc to get into the menu, and the screen went black. I pressed esc again, and I could hear the sounds of the game working in the background, and could hear my footsteps and gunfire as I moved and shot. But I had no video. The monitor said OUT OF SCAN RANGE. I hit reset and the video came back instantly. Later, I was playing HL again when it dumped the textures except railings, and bullet holes. Everything else was white, like the construct of the matrix. Player models were visible, but unskinned. Only after quitting and reloading HL did it return to normal (bluescreening later, of course). Also, I tried to load Q3, and it froze in the ID logo, belching a HORRIBLE screeching sound that was at full volume (I had my windows sound volume turned like 2/3 down). This only happened once tho. And a few times, the screen would go black, or flicker, then come back on normally.
Aggrivated, I yanked the right stick of ram (I have 2 slots), and fired up q3. It locked, but without the "Program Error" messages, and I could ctrl alt del out and into windows. I got NO bluescreens. It did it twice within 15 minutes, so I put the yanked stick back into its original slot, and yanked the other stick. I then played q3 for 40 minutes before getting a "Program Error." Again, NO bluescreens. I Put both sticks back in, this time swapping their slots (for the hell of it), fired up a q3 game, and bluescreened within 3 seconds. And now im back in windows, and its being flaky again.
Im confuzzled. My guess would be the mobo got zapped by lightning, causing it to have difficulty handling the ram, particularly, two sticks together. All bluescreens are either 0xD1 (irq conflict), 0x50 (memory access error), or 0x1E (0xC) (some sort of memory issue, either system or video). Twice ive gotten PFN_LIST_CORRUPTED (which I beleive was 0x4E). The incident with the texture dropping in HL makes me certain its some sort of ram issue, either system or video. The sudden drop of video feed is confusing, since the game continued to operate despite having no signal to the video card. This makes me guess its my video card somehow, because a mobo/system ram problem would have likely certainly crashed the game, or whole system. Though my friend, who knows much about computers and has a friend who is a computer god, is certain its a system ram issue.
I really dont know, and I need advice as to which it would be. Ive got a little fund for a video card upgrade I was about to induldge in, but now it seems ill have to spend it on replacement parts. I dont want to spend any of it without little reasonable doubt that the component im about to replace is the broken one. So, throw me your advice <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif'><!--endemo-->
So I come home sunday, and here come the problems. Bluescreens and game crashes get more frequent. I format, to no avail. I format again after it absolutely refuses to load windows. The crashes and bluescreens keep coming. It booted once into VGA for no apparant reason (I reinstalled my dets and it was fine). During a game of HL I pressed esc to get into the menu, and the screen went black. I pressed esc again, and I could hear the sounds of the game working in the background, and could hear my footsteps and gunfire as I moved and shot. But I had no video. The monitor said OUT OF SCAN RANGE. I hit reset and the video came back instantly. Later, I was playing HL again when it dumped the textures except railings, and bullet holes. Everything else was white, like the construct of the matrix. Player models were visible, but unskinned. Only after quitting and reloading HL did it return to normal (bluescreening later, of course). Also, I tried to load Q3, and it froze in the ID logo, belching a HORRIBLE screeching sound that was at full volume (I had my windows sound volume turned like 2/3 down). This only happened once tho. And a few times, the screen would go black, or flicker, then come back on normally.
Aggrivated, I yanked the right stick of ram (I have 2 slots), and fired up q3. It locked, but without the "Program Error" messages, and I could ctrl alt del out and into windows. I got NO bluescreens. It did it twice within 15 minutes, so I put the yanked stick back into its original slot, and yanked the other stick. I then played q3 for 40 minutes before getting a "Program Error." Again, NO bluescreens. I Put both sticks back in, this time swapping their slots (for the hell of it), fired up a q3 game, and bluescreened within 3 seconds. And now im back in windows, and its being flaky again.
Im confuzzled. My guess would be the mobo got zapped by lightning, causing it to have difficulty handling the ram, particularly, two sticks together. All bluescreens are either 0xD1 (irq conflict), 0x50 (memory access error), or 0x1E (0xC) (some sort of memory issue, either system or video). Twice ive gotten PFN_LIST_CORRUPTED (which I beleive was 0x4E). The incident with the texture dropping in HL makes me certain its some sort of ram issue, either system or video. The sudden drop of video feed is confusing, since the game continued to operate despite having no signal to the video card. This makes me guess its my video card somehow, because a mobo/system ram problem would have likely certainly crashed the game, or whole system. Though my friend, who knows much about computers and has a friend who is a computer god, is certain its a system ram issue.
I really dont know, and I need advice as to which it would be. Ive got a little fund for a video card upgrade I was about to induldge in, but now it seems ill have to spend it on replacement parts. I dont want to spend any of it without little reasonable doubt that the component im about to replace is the broken one. So, throw me your advice <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif'><!--endemo-->
Comments
I would start fresh and buy 2 sticks of ram.
The lightining probbably damaged your ram, and when that happend blue screens of death and crashes occur.
I had a bad peice of ram and i tried to play generals, the thing gave me the good old serious error (if your have generals and are on the forums then you know what im talking about)
My dad just bought some new ram for his comp and then i could play again <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif'><!--endemo-->