system crashes

[bobbyjo23]

I have an IWill k7s2 mobo with the athlon xp 2600+ and 1gb micron memory.
thermaltake volcano 11+ cpu cooler.

After a fresh installation of windows, everything seems to be running fine. But after about 1-2 weeks of use, programs start to crash at random, sometimes just closing it all together. After a short while of this happening (couple days) it'll gradually get worse until the system starts randomly rebooting... no reason i can discover for this at all. I'm in my dorm right now so it gets warm, but not too hot. I still manage to keep the cpu temp under 53 Celsius.

After a couple days of the reboots, it will not even boot into windows at all, but instead restart right after the windows logo screen.

After another fresh install, everything works fine again. Does anyone know what the problem could be? It can't be software as this is the 3rd installation of this happening... I'm not quite sure what hardware would be responsible...

My power supply's -5v does end up going down to -5.7v sometimes... but very rarely. It's usually between -5.59 - -5.64

would this be a problem? I'm not quite familiar with voltage levels (what's safe or not)

ANYONE got a suggestion? It would be very much appreciated as I am smashing my head against the walll right now..

 

[psd99]

aye

isnt it so annoying trouble shooting we all hate it,but when things are solved we love it

ritey if u got a blue error screen, try to make a not of the error. is it too fast that u cant make out what the error is? if u got xp go to control panel click on system then click on advanced then on startup and recover. do u see where it says 'automatically start?'
well make sure that it aint clicked, now if u got the blue screen take a note of the error and let us know.


ritey nw if your pc just keeps crashing like you were on abt be4 even getting to windows. there is a very good chance this is your power supply unit. the best thing to do is to change it. hae u got another pc? take it out put it into this pc. try to do this see what the diufference makes!!!!!!!!!

let us know if u need ne more help

all the best

 

[Matt Jason H]

I could be wrong but sounds like hard-drive problem to me, perhaps your hard drive is fussy (as modern high-density discs often are) and doesn't like your PSU, also providing some cooling for the HDD would be a wise move, perhaps just a 80mm fan.

 

[bobbyjo23]

solution here

Just to let you all know, none of those things would result in the inconsistency of the crashes... but here is the solution for those of you having any similar kind of crashing problems...

check u'r CAS latency... may be turned up too high.

I had pc3200 ddr (400mhz fsb)... well, my mobo did support it, unfortunately i was having problems and i pinpointed it to this...

i did a check using goldmemory 5.07 (goldmemory.cz) on my ram (u need to be in pure dos, they make a boot disk for ya)... i found errors up the wazu...

until i clocked down to 333mhz... that did the trick. you could also lower u'r CAS latency (i had mine set on 'normal', so i couldn't really turn that down anymore... besides, 333mhz is plenty fast yet)

anyway, just awaiting an update to the BIOS... just guessing it's a bug... meanwhile, check everythign to do with u'r speeds...

-Mike

 

[bobbyjo23]

one more note

the reason it would take awhile b4 things would start to crash... it depended upon how many programs resided in memory. as i ran/installed more (background services, etc) i would eat further into the ram... therefore causing problems once i tried using enuf.

it was just too dang fast for itself.. haha

 

[davie_pubman]

Could it be that you are using a microsoft OS? It is well known that Windows, of any variety, is not compatable with any PC hardware. This is a fault of the system, regardless of wether your equipment is fuctioning correctly! (sic)

 

[floppybootstomp]

Originally posted by davie_pubman
Could it be that you are using a microsoft OS? It is well known that Windows, of any variety, is not compatable with any PC hardware. This is a fault of the system, regardless of wether your equipment is fuctioning correctly! (sic)

You are of course, attempting a witty here, aren't you?

But I'm afraid you're talking absolute b******s mate

For all it's faults, MS OS's work quite well (except maybe for ME) and not all of us can get our heads round Linux. Windows is convenient and user-friendly. Now, I never thought I'd stick up for Bill gates, but statements like the one quoted are just downright stoopid.

Getting back to the prob, a - 5 volt reading in excess of 5 volts is actually quite a good thing. Just because it's a minus volts, don't think of it as lower, it's actually a 'plus' reading in relation to 0 volts. It's when you dip tp -4.5 volts and below you have to worry.