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A sudden strange problem! (need your help)

yannis76

yannis76

yannis76

Associate
Joined
16 Aug 2004
Posts
804
Hi people!

The last week my pc is experiencing a very annoying problem:

I am not sure when it started, but first Firefox has started to collapse. Whenever I was trying to surf the net, the program would work for a couple of minutes and then would not rspond. Alt+Ctrl+Del did not work and a hard reset was necessary to recover the PC.
When I changed to Google Chrome, the problem did not appear again. After a couple of days I noticed that my dvdrw did not work!! I couldnt read most of the cds and couldnt write anything! I changed it and the new device works fine.
Then suddenly and while playing Company of Heroes the screen went black and a message appeared "display driver stopped responding and has recovered"

This problem persisted, the pc ould freeze every 2 minutes for a couple of seconds and the above message would appear.
I unistalled the nvidia drivers, used Driver Sweeper to remove any nvidia file and tried to reinstall 182.50 latest drivers. Te nvidia setup program was never completed and I had to to make a hard reset! When I restarted the drivers installed were the 181.20!!!

After that the pc worked fine for 1,5 day and also played Company of Heroes for 2 hours. Last night after resuming from standby, mouse started to freeze and the message appeared. I had to restart and started to write this message, when Google Chrome started to freeze as well!!!

Right now, I am completing this message, have downloaded Prime 95, Linpack and memtest 86 just to start testing some things in the PC. Do you have any other ideas?

Thank you in advance and sorry for the long post
 
With such a varied set of "problems" it sounds like it may be a virus, imo you should do a reformat and complete reinstall, if it is a virus it'll fix it, if not you'll know to look at a hardware issue, though as I say with such varied errors it would be difficult to pin down if anything other than a virus
 
here are some updates:
Prime95 did run ok
Memtest made me pc reboot almost 30 seconds after it started. I removed the 2nd stick 1GB stick and now it goes on running. Do you think it is the memory?

Also running nod32 found two infected files: windows_crypt (?) and another one which I deleted.
 
Virus and/or buggered 2nd RAM stick.

Try the 2nd RAM stick on it's own in slot 1. If this fails then that stick is dead. If it survives the 2nd RAM slot on motherboard could be dead.


Get another anti virus (AntiVir, Avast, etc etc) and give the system a scan with that, to see if that picks up the infected file/s too.

If it is a virus then format and start again is really the only way to completely be rid of it.
 
Running memtest on the 2nd stick on the 1st slot and its up to 70% without any problems.
I will then test the 2nd slot only. I have also noticed that "Memory Remap" in bios is disabled. Could this also affect my pc?

If indeed the 2nd slot of mobo is dead I will go for a new 2x2gb kit. I am leaning towards Corsair TWIN2X4096-6400C5 G or Corsair 4GB DDR2-1066 Ram Kit (2 x 2GB, PC2 8500, 5-5-5-15, TWIN2X4096-8500C5DF). My PC is Q6600 but I am considering the 1066 part in case I will upgrade to a 1066 CPU later.

What do you think?
 
i had a load of random problems like blue screen of deaths/ unresposivness then eventually windows would just not load at all ( it would hang at the sliding blue bars with the xp logo). I reckon it was my hard drive as i reinstalled windows without the drive and everything has been perfect again since.

Not quite the same as yours but the hard drive could be a possibility?
 
I think for a very strange reason the motherboard cannot run anymore 4 sticks of DDR2.
Furthermore the three sticks run only at 800Mhz 5-5-5-15 although they are rated as DDR2-800 4-4-3-8. Do you think I should go for 2x2GB?
Which antivirus would you suggest?
NOD32 is considered to be great!
 
I think for a very strange reason the motherboard cannot run anymore 4 sticks of DDR2.
Furthermore the three sticks run only at 800Mhz 5-5-5-15 although they are rated as DDR2-800 4-4-3-8. Do you think I should go for 2x2GB?
Which antivirus would you suggest?
NOD32 is considered to be a good antivirus!
 
Running with 3 sticks makes the system a bit more stable but the message appeared again! Now I remembered that a few days ago I had also upgraded the bios to latest 1202. Now I will revert to an older one just to see whether there will be any difference.
 
If your problem is having all 4 sticks in then its likely to be a voltage issue, ensure your DRAM voltage is set to what the RAM is rated (prob around 2.1) and bump up your NB voltage by a couple of notches, that should stabilise the system when it comes to memory. However memory wouldnt explain all the isssues you described earlier
 
The full specs of my pc:

Q6600
4GB DDR2 Supertalent PC6400 4-4-3-8
Asus P5K-E
Geforce 260GTX
2xVelociraptor 300gb
Soundblaster X-Fi Music
Corsair HX620W

I have some more bad news. The surface test (chkdsk) is taking ages to finish. After 1 hour it is still in 15%...So apart from the memory the hard disk is also collapsing?
 
Was thinking that there maybe something wrong with your psu as it seems the components can't draw enough power .
Before doing a complete install of your os might be worth trying a different psu if your have one to hand ( just to rule it out )
 
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The hard disk surface test of chkdsk is not yet completed!! It is stuck at 70000 of 212000 files!!! Western Digital Diagnostics doesn't even start!
Any ideas?
 
Bad news...I ran the WD diagnostics tool and it says "to many bad sectors".
I guess that must be the main problem and not the memory.
Another question now: How can I transfer the data of the broken disk to a temporary disk and then to a new one? I want to backup the partition and when the replacement of the disk arrives just transfer the old partition to the new disk. Is this possible?

thanks
 
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