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vaporware

My Win2K + SP3 box is BSOD'ing......all the time

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Last November I freshly installed Windows 2000 on my computer. It ran fine up until early this month when applications began to crash far more frequently than normal. Counter-Strike would quit with "hl.exe has generated an error" and just last week svchost.exe crashed while I was running regedit. That's a first for both of those programs.

 

It generated it's first BSOD last week with "A thread to release a resource that it did not own." And again a few days later with "IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL."

 

I reformatted and freshly installed Windows 2000 again this past weekend. It's running SP3 with all latest updates and drivers (which I'll get to in a moment). Not even a day after the install, it BSOD'd again. I wasn't sure what the exact STOP error message was, because I had forgotten to disable the "Immediately reboot" setting under the Startup and Recovery tab.

 

Here's what happened today within a timespan of about 10 minutes.

 

KMODE EXCEPTION NOT HANDLED - SAVRT.SYS

<restarted>

(Several minutes later) "An attempt was made to write to read-only memory - wdmaud.sys"

<restarted>

(This time, Windows 2000 does not even boot) CONFIG INITIALIZATION FAILED

<restarted>

(Again, Windows 2000 doesn't boot) "Your motherboard's ACPI BIOS is not fully compliant" (I didn't write down the entire message. It was about a paragraph in length.)

 

System Specs:

AMD Athlon XP 1800 w/ Coolermaster heatsink+fan

Gigabyte 7ZXE with latest BIOS (August 2002/F9) and Via 4-in-1 drivers

512 MB PC133 SDRAM (Unknown brand; purchased from www.tcwo.com)

GeForce Ti 200 64 MB (Visiontek) with latest drivers from Nvidia (December 3, 2002)

Netgear FA311 with latest drivers (1.80 or 1.90 - I forget)

AC97 onboard sound (I was using Gigabyte's drivers, but then switched over to Microsoft's, which were found on Windows Update)

 

One more thing: my computer has been locking up while I was navigating various BIOS settings today after all this started to happen. I'm really leaning towards bad motherboard/processor. Am I right?

 

Thanks,

 

--

vaporware

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I'm leaning towards processor but memory could quite easily be the culprit. (Especially since it's an "Unknown Brand")

 

Have you tried Memtest 86?

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Quote:
I'm leaning towards processor but memory could quite easily be the culprit. (Especially since it's an "Unknown Brand")

Have you tried Memtest 86?


Nope. I haven't tried Memtest 86. Will do that first thing when I get home tonight.

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I ran Memtest86 overnight for 7 hours. Here are the results:

 

WallTime: 7:00

Cached: 511 MB

RsvdMem: 121 K

MemMap: e820-std

Cache: on

Pattern:

Test:

Pass: 13

Errors: 210

 

Looks like bad memory. Fortunately, I'm using 1 512 MB DIMM, so it's rather obvious which one it is. Hahaha.

 

Before I actually buy some decent memory from www.crucial.com or www.mushkin.com, is it still possible that the processor or mainboard could be bad?

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