I was playing STALKER, and the computer crashed on me-didn't blue screen or quit to desktop, it simply crashed. I hard reset it, and a message came up saying something along the lines of "BIOS bootbox, BIOS auto-recovering from hard drive". It did this, then rebooted itself and did the same thing again. Then it rebooted once more and just stuck with no video output. All of this occurred before posting.
I cleared the CMOS and tried to boot up again, and it still failed, so I took out 3 sticks of RAM and booted up again. It worked, so I backed up my finals revision notes (would have probably thrown myself out of a window had I lost them!) and then shut down again, put the RAM voltage up slightly (having cleared the CMOS it was back down at 1.8) and tried putting the RAM back in. Again, it failed to post.
I took the sticks out one at a time, and finally found which 3 worked together. I then put one of the working 3 sticks in the slot which I took the bad one out of, and the PC still booted fine, so I tried again with all 4 sticks (with the "bad" one in a different slot) and again it has worked fine, so I'm really confused.
A moment ago, though, my keyboard and mouse had a hissy fit and stopped responding completely. Looking back on it, I'm not sure if they had stopped working or if the PC crashed totally. My wireless keyboard does have a habit of breaking consistently, but my mouse is usually pretty reliable.
Anyway, I rebooted and it all seems to be working fine now, although I am using my housemate's wired keyboard.
I am planning on running the Windows memory diag tool in a moment (I know it should be Memtest, but I don't have 8 hours-I have a LOT of essays to write!!!).
Does anyone have any idea of what went wrong? It seems weird that a possible memory fault would cause me to need to reset the CMOS, and if it isn't a memory fault do I have a faulty mobo? Or is it just something that happens occasionally?!
My specs are:
Gigabyte P35C-DS3R
Crucial Ballistix DDR2 5300 (2x1gb, 2x512mb)
Gecube HD3850
Intel E4500
320 GB Seagate 7200.10 HDD
Samsung IDE DVD RW
Vista 32bit
Logitech wireless "Itouch" keyboard, wireless MX610 mouse.
Cheers
I cleared the CMOS and tried to boot up again, and it still failed, so I took out 3 sticks of RAM and booted up again. It worked, so I backed up my finals revision notes (would have probably thrown myself out of a window had I lost them!) and then shut down again, put the RAM voltage up slightly (having cleared the CMOS it was back down at 1.8) and tried putting the RAM back in. Again, it failed to post.
I took the sticks out one at a time, and finally found which 3 worked together. I then put one of the working 3 sticks in the slot which I took the bad one out of, and the PC still booted fine, so I tried again with all 4 sticks (with the "bad" one in a different slot) and again it has worked fine, so I'm really confused.
A moment ago, though, my keyboard and mouse had a hissy fit and stopped responding completely. Looking back on it, I'm not sure if they had stopped working or if the PC crashed totally. My wireless keyboard does have a habit of breaking consistently, but my mouse is usually pretty reliable.
Anyway, I rebooted and it all seems to be working fine now, although I am using my housemate's wired keyboard.
I am planning on running the Windows memory diag tool in a moment (I know it should be Memtest, but I don't have 8 hours-I have a LOT of essays to write!!!).
Does anyone have any idea of what went wrong? It seems weird that a possible memory fault would cause me to need to reset the CMOS, and if it isn't a memory fault do I have a faulty mobo? Or is it just something that happens occasionally?!
My specs are:
Gigabyte P35C-DS3R
Crucial Ballistix DDR2 5300 (2x1gb, 2x512mb)
Gecube HD3850
Intel E4500
320 GB Seagate 7200.10 HDD
Samsung IDE DVD RW
Vista 32bit
Logitech wireless "Itouch" keyboard, wireless MX610 mouse.
Cheers
