Just a warning, this might be a lengthy post.
About a month ago I decided to buy a new computer to replace my Athlon 1100. I opted for a P4 2.4 800FSB and a Asus P4PE-X to save a little.
Now for the last few weeks I've been very frustrated by constant crashes, freezes, BSOD errors (IRQL, PAGE_FAULT, etc.), and reinstalling Windows XP, 2k, and 98 over 20 times. Several errors were caused by my Radeon 9000 but even after removing that I still received occasional freezes. I was forced to use Win98 after a big crash and for some reason my XP and 2k installations kept reporting invalid files, images, and whatnot. So I read some posts in here and downloaded memtestx86.
200000 errors.
This was the first test. I decided to reinstall all the drivers for my mobo and suddenly the errors dropped down to around 100. Feeling somewhat happy, I chose to install 2000. No problems. Then I decided to put XP on a new Western Digital 80GB. No problems.
My Radeon was running perfectly on the Athlon computer so I decided to move it back. For about 48 hours there were no problems, so I fired up Morrowind and after an hour of play, it suddenly shuts down and absolutely everything on my desktop has weird symbols instead of titles. Even the word Start on the start button had strange markings instead. These aren't the symbols you can include in Office or whatever, but they looked like an entire different language, be it Chinese, Korean, Arabic, or something the aliens put in my cursed computer.
2 minutes later, my computer changed resolution to something so low I wasn't even aware that my vid card supported it and popped up with an error message saying some file was corrupt. So I clicked Ok and the computer rebooted.
Normal bootup led to a stop error (forgot the code) and safe mode led to the logon screen and a message that said registry values were successfully restored before freezing.
And now I'm back using 98 but no matter what I do I can't get memtest to stop reporting errors (unless I pause it at the very start that is
). Tried stripping the computer to barebones, installing a new HD, disabling one of my CD-RWs, reinstalling all drivers, replacing the vid card with an old SiS 315E, and flashing the BIOS (which I could not do due to something called Flash Memory: UNKNOWN).
The strange thing is, through all of it, the Windows 98 CD always successfully installed while the other 2 had problems.
System Specs:
Pentium 4 2.4 GHZ 800
Asus P4PE-X Mobo
LITE-ON DVD-ROM CD-RW Combo
Westen Digital Caviar 80GB
Sapphire Radeon 9000 128MB
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2
Linear Mode
