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re: Question about 'Top reasons for random, fatal crashes in Windows XP and Windows 2000'
Wednesday, April 30, 2003 at 5:27 am
Windows 2000 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Mark
(1 messages posted)
As I have read in other posts, on other websites, this seems to be a fairly common
problem. I've experienced it on only one of my four Windows XP Pro machines though.
This particular machine is a 1900+ with a 128MB ATI Radeon 9000 Pro. Generally speaking
it's only happened on games, however when this machine had a GeForce 3 Ti500 64MB
card in it, it could happen at anytime.
There are lots of writings about PSUs being the problem, however I don't entirely
buy into this argument. The reason for this is that I have a machine with an 1800+
processor on a Abit KD7 KT400 MB. It also has a SCSI HDD & CD-ReWriter on a AHA-2940U2W
card. Now SCSI hard drives are notoriously power hungry and this being a 10K spin
speed one is no exception to the rule. The machine also features the usual trappings,
although Sound and Networking are on the mainboard rather than seperate cards. Yet
despite the 250watt PSU the machine is stable as anything. I had some friends over
a few days ago and it played Medal Of Honor non-stop for about 6 hours and not once
did it crash, restart or do anything untoward. The PSU itself is simply the one that
came with the case as well, so it's nothing 'high end'.
Like many people may have done now, I've disabled the automatic restart to try and
pin down what file(s) or hardware might be causing the problem. One possibility I
haven't ruled out though is that it's something to do with having 1GB of RAM in my
machine that exhibits the problem. I will be testing this theory tomorrow though
since I have another Abit KD7 winging it's way to me which I will be installing in
a machine with an 1GHz Athlon Processor, and nicking 512MB RAM from my main machine
to put in this upgraded box.
With regard to the overheating issues, well I don't buy these either since I'm running
in a Coolermaster case with loads of fans in it and the Processor is cooled by a
Zalman flowers cooler. Usually if a machine or processor overheats it freezes rather
than restarts, it's what you'd expect if your processor fan fails. After being on
and reaching temperature X it will typically lock up, bar the motherboard detecting
over heating and shutting your machine down.
Memory problems? Well possibly, but memory chips can be tested with memory testers.
So could it be something else? Driver instabilities? Mismatching hardware?
Just for reference at time of writing my machine was running the latest BIOS revision,
all the latest drivers, and Windowsupdate, is fully uptodate.
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 |  | re: Question about 'Top reasons for random, fatal crashes in Windows XP and Windows 2000' (Mark: Wed, Apr 30, 2003, 5:27 am) |
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