Something is wrong with my computer!

[Guest]

My PC has crashed on 3 seperate occasions now to a BSOD, all three while
playing WoW. It might be a hardware issue, but I wouldn't know. Here's
exactly what happened.

First crash in WoW, rebooted, no problems.

About a week later, today, game crashed again during WoW. Physical memory
dump never started, so I did a hard reset. After the intel pentium 4 screen,
it told me it wasn't booting from the right drive, so I went into the BIOS
and set it to boot from the hard drive, restarted but I got the same error
message. Went into the BIOS again and set it to default, computer rebooted
fine.

Several hours later, again while playing WoW I got another BSOD, I did
exactly what I mentioned above but this time it didn't reboot properly,
instead again I got the error about not booting from the correct drive. I
retried several times but then in the BIOS, I had a strange sort of crash, my
BIOS went nuts and froze on me, but before it froze all the characters became
corrupt and a bunch of random numbers appeared on the screen, it was similar
to when an oldschool Nintendo game gets "busted" and all the game code
appears onscreen. I did a hard reset.

After restarting the computer several times, it boot up to Windows again.
I'm currently in the process of backing up my files because I have absolutely
no idea what is causing this issue and am preparing in case I need to wipe
the hard drive or reinstall Windows or whatever.

Based off of this information, what do you think may be the problem, and
what do you recommend I do?

 

[Malke]

My PC has crashed on 3 seperate occasions now to a BSOD, all three
while playing WoW. It might be a hardware issue, but I wouldn't know.
Here's exactly what happened.

First crash in WoW, rebooted, no problems.

About a week later, today, game crashed again during WoW. Physical
memory dump never started, so I did a hard reset. After the intel
pentium 4 screen, it told me it wasn't booting from the right drive,
so I went into the BIOS and set it to boot from the hard drive,
restarted but I got the same error message. Went into the BIOS again
and set it to default, computer rebooted fine.
(snippage)

Based off of this information, what do you think may be the problem,
and what do you recommend I do?

Since you didn't tell us any of the Stop Errors (the white writing on
the blue screens), we can't give you specific advice. However, from
your description of the computer's behavior I would guess that you are
having hardware failure. It could be overheating, bad RAM, a failing
video card, or a failing motherboard. There is no way to tell from what
you've posted.

Here are some general hardware troubleshooting steps:
http://www.elephantboycomputers.com/page2.html#Hardware_Tshoot

Testing hardware failures often involves swapping out suspected parts
with known-good parts. If you can't do the testing yourself and/or are
uncomfortable opening your computer, take the machine to a professional
computer repair shop (not your local equivalent of BigStoreUSA).

Malke

 

[NewScience]

What happens if you don't play WoW?

 

[Yves Leclerc]

You did not mention the specs for your PC.

In general, you need to check for:

1) Defective had drive sectors (Chkdsk) or the hard drive diagnostic tool
(from the drive manufacturer.

2) Bad memory with MemTest86+

3) Temperature too hot. (Use the motherboard monitoring software for your
motherboard or SpeedFan)

4) Install latest drivers for your video card and motherboard chipset. Get
them directly from the video card and motherboard manufacturer. DO NOT RELY
ON WINODWS UPDATES driver versions!

5) Make sure that you are running DirectX 9.0c (Latest from Microsoft.)

6) Look for any WoW updates and install these.

7) Check with WoW support for an FAQs recommendations and try these