Hi all,
I wonder if anyone could help me, please? I'm a bit of a hardware novice, I've reached the end of my tether with this particular problem and am not far off selling off another good system for cheap scrap...
First, my system spec:
Packard Bell iMedia - Intel Core Duo 1.86Ghz
2Gb DDR2 RAM
400Gb HD
Nvidia GeForce 8500 video card
XP Home Edition
Right, this could be a long story, but I'll try to include as much detail as I can.
My PC started having problems a few weeks back, primarily through Firefox and Chrome continually and repeatedly crashing and restarting. I was told this could be a Flash issue, so I reinstalled that and reinstalled the browsers. Same problem. Next, and increasingly more common, Windows Explorer frequently started collapsing in on itself, telling me it had to close, followed by the usual Dr Watson post-mortem stuff. This was combined with a series of BSODs, frequently brought about (as with the browser restarts) by watching youtube videos - if there could be a correlation between the two, I'm not sure.
Here's an example of one, but they were all the same variety - STOP 0x0000008E errors.
http://i32.tinypic.com/ix8e4m.jpg
I read that these were probably brought about by faulty RAM, so I replaced my old 2 x 512mb sticks with some brand new 2 x 1gb sticks yesterday. The RAM was installed fine, but the same consistent Windows Explorer error kept occuring, to the point where the system was seriously unstable most of the time.
My next step was to reinstall XP, which I did yesterday, but I got the same blue screen errors even when that was in the installlation stages - incredibly frustrating. For a while every time I booted the system I was met with the same error. Somehow I eventually got past that, thanks to persistent reboot attempts.
I ran chkdsk on both my partitioned drives earlier today - it initially found some errors, but these are all now fixed and the drives have been reported as clean.
I ran memtest, and this is coming back with multiple errors (loads!) from both sockets/RAM ports (I can't remember the exact terminology, sorry!). One test reported literally millions of errors. Yet my RAM is brand new and was installed safely and correctly, so I'm completely confused as to why this is the case. Could it be a problem with the RAM sockets on my motherboard?
As a result of the reinstall, my system seems a little more stable - I managed to get online to post this! - but I'm still get the same Windows Explorer/Dr Watson errors/closes and unpredictable BSODs regularly.
Another BSOD I just had was listed in Event Viewer as a system error, ER_KRNLCRASH_LOG .
I'd really appreciate any help.
Thanks.
I wonder if anyone could help me, please? I'm a bit of a hardware novice, I've reached the end of my tether with this particular problem and am not far off selling off another good system for cheap scrap...
First, my system spec:
Packard Bell iMedia - Intel Core Duo 1.86Ghz
2Gb DDR2 RAM
400Gb HD
Nvidia GeForce 8500 video card
XP Home Edition
Right, this could be a long story, but I'll try to include as much detail as I can.
My PC started having problems a few weeks back, primarily through Firefox and Chrome continually and repeatedly crashing and restarting. I was told this could be a Flash issue, so I reinstalled that and reinstalled the browsers. Same problem. Next, and increasingly more common, Windows Explorer frequently started collapsing in on itself, telling me it had to close, followed by the usual Dr Watson post-mortem stuff. This was combined with a series of BSODs, frequently brought about (as with the browser restarts) by watching youtube videos - if there could be a correlation between the two, I'm not sure.
Here's an example of one, but they were all the same variety - STOP 0x0000008E errors.
http://i32.tinypic.com/ix8e4m.jpg
I read that these were probably brought about by faulty RAM, so I replaced my old 2 x 512mb sticks with some brand new 2 x 1gb sticks yesterday. The RAM was installed fine, but the same consistent Windows Explorer error kept occuring, to the point where the system was seriously unstable most of the time.
My next step was to reinstall XP, which I did yesterday, but I got the same blue screen errors even when that was in the installlation stages - incredibly frustrating. For a while every time I booted the system I was met with the same error. Somehow I eventually got past that, thanks to persistent reboot attempts.
I ran chkdsk on both my partitioned drives earlier today - it initially found some errors, but these are all now fixed and the drives have been reported as clean.
I ran memtest, and this is coming back with multiple errors (loads!) from both sockets/RAM ports (I can't remember the exact terminology, sorry!). One test reported literally millions of errors. Yet my RAM is brand new and was installed safely and correctly, so I'm completely confused as to why this is the case. Could it be a problem with the RAM sockets on my motherboard?
As a result of the reinstall, my system seems a little more stable - I managed to get online to post this! - but I'm still get the same Windows Explorer/Dr Watson errors/closes and unpredictable BSODs regularly.
Another BSOD I just had was listed in Event Viewer as a system error, ER_KRNLCRASH_LOG .
I'd really appreciate any help.
Thanks.
