Plagued by PC problems

Overmind

Well-Known Member
Joined
Jun 21, 2004
Messages
110
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1
Location
South Africa.
My aging PC is plagued by more and more problems as time goes by.

Here's my specs:

AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (1.8 Ghz)
1.5 GB Ram
Seagate 320GB SATA II drive
Samsung Writemaster DVD-RW SATA drive
ATI Radeon 9600 XT 128 MB AGP 8x
DLink Wireless G PCI
ASUS A8V Deluxe Motherboard
350 W Enermax Power supply
Windows XP Professional SP3

My main problem is blue screens with certain games. Eve-online, for example, crashes randomly with a blue screen. The blue screen is just blue and contains no error info. When I get back into Windows a dialog box pops up stating that the system recovered from a serious error. I then send the error to Microsoft and get a website that says it can't obtain any usable info from the error report.

I've had this problem through numerous driver updates and fresh installations of Windows with SP2 and SP3. I've come to accept this as some hardware incompatibility.

Yesterday while playing a game it froze for a few seconds and I heard the hard drive turn off and on (that is what it sounded like). I found the following in the Event log:

Error
Event ID 9
The device, \Device\Scsi\viamraid1, did not respond within the timeout period.

and also

Warning
Event ID 51
An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation.

These two entries always happen together. The hard drive is the newest device in my system and is roughly 6-9 months old.

Now by chance I stumbled on an article about power supplies and I have now convinced myself that this is my problem. Unfortunately I know almost nothing about electricity but my PSU is probably not providing enough power on the +12V rail. Here is 'n photo of the label on my PSU: http://img385.imageshack.us/img385/3015/psuwv8.jpg

Given the above, could it be that under heavy load the PSU cannot provide enough power and I get crashes?
 
Ok try this, just dedicate one 4 pin molex to that HDD and connect whatevr else that needs to be connect to the other 4pin molex and try again

It does sound like an aging psu, my bro's pc did this until I reconnected everything inside, connected all his fans and dvd writer to one and the hdds to another...that sorted it.
 
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