Harddrive/mobo/both? Something's Wrong!

[ClayMeow]

First, here's the specs of the computer (since it's my bro's and not the one listed in my sig which is mine):

 

DFI AK76-SN mobo

Athlon Thunderbird: 1.133GHz

[gouber5585]

i'm not sure, but it sounds like bad memory to me. cause if it doesn't freeze at the same time every time, there could be memory errors causing it. you should try another stick of memory and see if it works.

[ccokeman]

Drop the video aperature size to 64mb and retry If i go over 64 i get lock ups

[ClayMeow]

i'm not sure, but it sounds like bad memory to me. cause if it doesn't freeze at the same time every time, there could be memory errors causing it. you should try another stick of memory and see if it works.

I thought it was bad memory the last time it had problems, which is y i put a new stick in it. In addition, i put it in the 2nd dimm slot instead of the first in case something was wrong with the dimm slot, though if there was, both would probably be bad. Anyway, it was running fine last time i formatted and installed winxp 2 weeks ago. Then when my bro took it to school and hooked it up and tried to download the windows updates, problems started occurring. He said he was unable to scroll through the update window. Later it restarted and then kept on restarting while updating the dmi, or whatever that msg is. That's y he brought it home for me to reformat, and now, it won't run the setup.

[ClayMeow]

Drop the video aperature size to 64mb and retry If i go over 64 i get lock ups

am i able to do that even though the video card is 256ddr?

[Transattic]

look in the bios... they give you a choice for that agp aparture size

[LobbDogg]

Also do you hear any clicking noises coming from the HDD at any given point? I've run diag software on HDDs before and they found no probs with the HDD, but I could tell it was the HDD, I replaced the drive and voila it worked fine. And it was causing lockups at random times, mainly while booting, but also just while surfing the net, playing games etc.

[ClayMeow]

I took it to a computer diagnostic store, and after running tests, they determined my memory was bad. Which pisses me off because i had just put it in, so i'll have to write the company. Luckily, i had given the store 2 other sticks i had, and they checked out fine, so they put those in and installed winxp, and said they left it on all day, and it never restarted or crashed. So i take it home and start it up. I go to update the video drivers so it can actually recognize i have an fx5200, and it restarts...and keeps on restarting at various times thereafter. So i call the guy, and he says that it's the drivers, and even though it claims to be xp compatible, it may not be. So i do a system restore to the point i was at before the drivers, and while doing other things, like installing programs and stuff, it still restarts randomly. The guy then told me there could still be remnants of the drivers in the registry causing the problem (which is obviously possible), so he says to do a fresh install of winxp again. So i format the drive and do the setup. In the middle of the setup, i get a BSD with a 0x0000008E error, with a memory dump, etc. So i restart and it runs scandisk and has a ton of errors that scroll. When it finally gets done with that, it restarts the setup, and it's going fine, a little past where it did the time before, and then i get a BSD with a 0x0000000A stop error.

 

I'm taking it back to the shop tomorrow. this is bs. I took pics of the screens with my dig cam to show the guy.

 

note: the reason i've not been on the boards the last two days, was because, since my bro came back for the weekend, and his comp wasn't working in time, i had to give him the family comp to take back to college. And my computer is currently without a bios chip, since i had to send it back to asus to get re-flashed. thus, my dad must now bring home his office laptop every night until we get this crap resolved