Wierd XP Crash with Black Screen - Help!

I have been trying to troubleshoot windows crashes I am having and I am not having much luck. I considder my troubleshooting skills to be pretty good. Can any one help? Please excuse my spelling.

The crashes usually, 95% of the time, result in a black screen. My system is running still, cpu & case fans,etc. I have to hold the power swith in or hit restart to reboot the system. The system then reboots fine, there are no error messages or blue screen messages. There are no logs in the event viewer nor is a mimidump file created.

About 1% of the time, the screen I am using freezes, when this happens two diferent things have happened. One, the sysem very shortly after the screen will go black, and then the system will reboot. Again, no event logs, no minidump files, except on a few occasions. Two, (this has happened only twice) the blue screen will come up and the text is all garbled - looks like it is written in latin or klingon. I'm not talking hex numbers, memory addresses, I'm talking complete scramble. Then I have to reboot the system. On four occasions I have gotton a mimidump file on reboot. The event log states such. I tried reading one of these files in notepad. Yeh, right.

My automatic restart is unchecked (control panel, advanced, startup & recover).

Here is how the crash happens. I can 100% of the time make the system crashe by holding down the control key and using by mouse wheel to zoom back in and out. Sometimes It will take 20 seconds of zooming, sometimes on the first zoom, crash. The crashes have also occured by backspacing in a word doc. A couple of times the crash has occured by clicking on a link in a web browser. When the system crashes I have either been in Word, excel, publisher (versions 2003, updated with SP-1) & my web browser (firefox 1.0pr). Word seems to be the worst.

When I first noticed the problem, I was using a Asus K8V Deluxe Motherboard. I thought it was the motherboard because I had seet it back to ASUS for repair (bios chip bad). The motherboard change did not help, for I am now using a MSI K8T Neo2.

I have run spybot, ad-ware & PC Cillin to check for spyware & viruses: none found. I have crashed with the anti virus software on and off.

I a running XP pro, SP-2, clean install from OEM disk.

The rest of my hardware cofig. is as follows:

MSI K8V Neo2 motherboard.
3500+ Athlon 64 processor.
480 w antiec power supply.
2 sticks Corsair CMX512-3200 C2 400 mhz DDR (properly cofigured in bios)
2 segate 120 Sata drives running on the onboard VIA raid controler (raid 1).
ATI 9800 Pro 256 Graphics Card.

Optical drives, key board, and mouse have either been swapped out or unplugged to see if they were the problem.

I am running the very latest drivers for the motherboard, raid, graphics card, etc.

I have tried turning off Enable write combining & setting hardware acceleration to none (display properties, settings, advanced, troubleshoot). It took longer to crash the system when I did this. But after about 20 seconds of using ctl-mouse scroll in word, the same black screen.

I have a pretty much identical system at home except I have an FX-53 processor, and an older Gforce 4 Ti44400 graphics card in it. I have not been able to crash that system. The only other major difference is that I updated XP SP-1 to SP-2 from windows update. The machine that crashes has a fresh install of SP-2 from a OEM disk i purchased from Newegg.

I tryed switching the RAM from the second computer to the one that crashes, no luck. Next I'm going to try switching the vidio cards.

I have tryed reformatting my hard drives and clean installing windows. Did not help.

I have monitored my system & CPU temps. My case is well ventalated and by processor runs under 38 deg. C, usually about 34 deg. When the system creashes, i have not noticed a spike in CPU or system temps. I am not overclocking any component at this time.

Any one want to take a stab at this?

 

You've tried most things Turtle.
I was going to suggest you uninstall any Mouse and keyboard software and then delete the keyboard and then mouse from the device manager, but I guess a reformat will have done the same.
You are not using any extra software for either of these devices. Just the stock XP drivers?

Next I'd look at your BIOS. Use the plain vanilla setup defaults in the BIOS setup. Disable power management. Should be disabled by default? Check for a BIOS update for the MB. Reseat the CPU.

Yes I would try swapping video cards. The NVIDIA reference drivers should be fine if you want to update the drivers straight away. Although it might be worth while sticking with the generic ones in XP for fault finding purposes.

You could uninstall the the ATI drivers and run the ATI with only XP generic ones also for testing.

 

Thanks,

I started off with the stock xp drivers with my mouse & keyboard; then as a troubleshooting step, installed the logiteck drivers: result nil. However I did not go back to the generic drivers when trying new mouse & keys.

I have reflashed my bios with the latest one from the MSI website: result nil. Do you meen by reseting the processor to take the batery out & jump the board reset switch? I have not tried that, but a reflash seems like it should work if this were to be a solution.

I have disabled all onboard devices in the bois, sound, etc., result nil.

Power management is disabled. And hybernation off in windows.

I started of with the xp drivers for my ATI card, then went to the ones from MSI, and lastly to the latest ones from ATI.

I'm going to switch out that ATI card for my good old fashion TI4400 tomaro; will post result.

 

Walla!!!!

I removed the ATI 9600 Pro and installed my old Geforce 4 TI4400, and whammo, no crashing.

I control-mouse scroll zoomed a word document for 5 straight minutes and then did the same in firefox with a graphic rich web page for another 5 minutes. No crashing, problem solved, except for the large amount of cash I laid down for the (faulty?) ATI card.

 

Glad she's up and running. Your "OLD" Ti4400 isn't THAT OLD. I consider my Ti4200 to be still usefull. Well, Doom 3 plays OK with it.

Is the ATI still under warranty. Maybe you could get it replaced, or swap for something else?

 

Yeh, the ATI is in the my other computer now, and it crashing the same way. It's RMA-ing back to newegg tommaro. I just wonder if its the card itself that is defective or if the 9800 pro in general has a problem with, via chipset (drivers agp 2 to agp 3), combined with xp sp-2. I'll find out in a couple of weeks when I get my new card back. Will post results.

Bummer for ATI if they find out that when VIA k8t800pro/ AMD Hammer chipset users swith from doom 3 to ms word and try to write a simple letter, there system crashes. Or maybe its a via chipset driver problem.

I'll find out in a couple of weeks when I get my new card back. Will post results.