WTB Demonolgy Specced lock to exercise my computer

[Absalom]

I finally got a chance to do something besides kara tonight.. I got invited to hit TK and I was rather excited to go.

Fast forward to Phase 3 on Kael.

As I'm going for one of the weapons, I am greeted by a small square shapped box in the center of my screen. In the center of said box is a red circle with a spiteful white X emblazoned upon it. I grew quite upset as I realized that this is the "I dont know why I died, but I did" error from WoW, just as the rest of my game crashed.

My game had been crashing out of nowhere before. Zoning into shattrath, sitting afk in felwood, it really didnt matter. It wasnt cpu or gpu load. Just poof.

It got to the point that my system would blue screen if I left it on too long then it progressed into a blue screen followed by a hard drive that couldnt find any data on itself.

I took the drive to work and scanned it with some tools I had there. the drive seemed fine. I managed to use the same tools on the drive in my system at home and got a ton of read and write errors. I guessed the controller on the motherboard. So I replaced the motherboard and the hard drive(to be safe) and I'm getting the exact same problems.... Random game crashes or crashes from just Alt+Tabbing out to check TS, or a guide.

Why would two different motherboards and two different drives behave this way? I am wondering if my power supply is killing things. Maybe that or the ten year old surge protector that it's pugged into. Im really at a loss and im tired of having my system be unstable. I can't imagine this does wonders for me getting another good raid invite either.

[Swoop]

Could be faulty memory, or damaged CPU. Power supply might be an issue, but in my experience that's pretty rare. Generally, power supplies are a binary fail :p (bad earth rail can cause instability in systems ranging from mildly annoying to impossible to work) If you're familiar with using a multimeter you can check output voltages from the power supply. Try disconnecting every non-essential piece of internal/external hardware (CD ROM, extra hard drives, printer etc) and testing stability.

If your power supply is on the way out, it may be having issues when under load, but fine at idle. e.g. O/S loaded and nothing happening = fine, playing WoW = graphics card draws more juice and power supply can't cope, causing reduced power to other system components and system failures.

However, depending on the age of your system and the amount of spare cash you have floating around, you could start by replacing the cheapest parts of your system and moving on to more expensive until you either have a working (practically new) system, or an rebuilt test rig that still doesn't work.

Obviously it depends on what components you're using, but in general I'd put the price of components from cheapest to most expensive as Ram > Power supply > CPU. There's not a lot else to test, and you've already replaced two of the most common points of failure.

[Barkle]

WTB Demonolgy Specced lock to exercise my comp

Why, is your Felguard looking fat?

Sorry, could't resist ...

Not a fan of randomly changing parts if you have to pay for them. If you have spare part laying around, go right ahead. Otherwise, test, isolate and then fix.

You replaced the motherboard and the hard drive and are still having the same problem? Those parts are not the problem then.

Power supply: I have seen a number of power supplies fail partially. If a specific voltage from the PS goes wonky, it can affect odd parts like chipset fans, cpu fans and other things that might not be noticed 100% of the time. A power supply tester will only run you about $10 - $15. Simple device that you plug into the outputs from the PS and it lights up to tell you what is working and what is not. Has solved many, many problems for me.

Memory: can also cause some strange errors. Best bet is to download a memory test and run it. Just google "memory test". To run them correctly, you need to burn it to a CD and boot from the CD so it can test the entire memory without crashing windows. Let it run overnight. If you get errors, remove all but one DIMM and run the test again, and keep swapping out the DIMMS until you isolate the bad one.

Blue screens: what do they say? the answer is usually in the stop: ########x# codes on the BSOD. If your computer reboots automatically at the blue screen (dumb MS fix ... look, no more blue screen of death!) do the following to turn that feature off:

• right click My Computer
• Properties
• Advanced tab
• under Startup and Recovery, click the Settings button
• under System Failure, remove the check next to Automatically Restart
• Ok
• Ok

This will stop the computer from automatically restarting when it gets a blue screen of death, and will allow you to see the error message.

Good luck .. these are usually frustrating things to track down.

[Meridani]

I can't remember exactly how to check but try do a Google search for checking your Eventlog. It usually has an entry after each BSoD and that piece of information can be further google-ed to find out if you have a hardware problem or a software problem, and even which component I believe.

The random crashing does sound like a RAM problem to me. You should also try run Memtest.

[azeazezar]

The fact that it happens after some time might suggest that stuff is overheating.

Try checking your cpu, gpu and hdd temperature, after playing for about 15 min.

I hope you manage to fix things

-Aze-

[Faraque]

Side note...

If you play other graphic intense game (on par with WoW) and have no troubles, it could simply be a software problem. If it *only* BSOD's with WoW, that's indicative of a problem *with* WoW.

The only remedy along that line I know is delete the cache folder, if you have any modified .mpq's in your data folder, ditch them, and clear wtf folder (make a backup of said things first, so if it's not the cause, it's easily replaced)

I wish you luck in tracking down the problem, whatever it may be.

[Absalom]

Thanks for the suggestions.

A little more info:

I am running an Antec 900 case with all the fans set to high. I do keep the front and side grills clean most of the time but when I checked last night, the CPU fan (Zalman) had a small layer of dirt on the blades. I wouldn't expect that small amount to cause any serious heating issues.. but I'll get some air on it before too long.

I have downloaded a memory test (MemTest86 2.01) and ran that on the previous motherboard and found no issues. In thinking about it a bit more, this is the exact same memory (type/brand) that my girlfriend had in her system when she was seeing wow issues as well. The system didn't seem to have any real issues with the memory and the board listed it as supported. She got a new motherboard and swapped out the memory for either Gskill or Kingston (i'd have to check as I dont remember off hand) and she seems to be doing fine now.

As for the blue screens, I did check out the stop message and it was one of the earlier factors leading me to believe it was in the hard drive/ HDD controller area. Needless to say I dont have it automatically reboot (I like having stop messages give me something to work with however vague they can be sometimes)

I think I've come to want to try out a PSU tester if I can find one, then maybe try some new memory.

Thanks for the input. Hopefully I can get this taken care of.