A multitude of crashes - various causes?

Hi there, I've been having bsod's fairly regularly for a while. I can't remember if any particular event set them off but did some basic testing; several iterations of memtest, (clean) swapping out the memory sticks to see if there was any noticeable difference and prime95.

Now, with prime95, I did not see any errors with only one stick of memory in, but when there were two, there was a hw error every time, as reported by prime95.

I then turned on memory dumps to see if there was any pattern there;

of several I have had according to Windbg;

Probably caused by : memory_corruption x 7
Probably caused by : win32k.sys x 1
Probably caused by : avg7rsw.sys x 2
Probably caused by : ati2cqag.dll x 2
Probably caused by : vsdatant.sys x2
Probably caused by : mouclass.sys x 1
Probably caused by : ntkrpamp.exe x 2
Probably caused by : Pool_Corruption x 1

you get the picture..

Now, I suspect it's a hardware error, possibly with the memory bus and am thinking about getting a new m'board. It's elderly and my system could do with a new cpu/mem/m'board to spruce it up a little anyway.

Um, I'm running winxp Pro with latestest patches, and latest drivers for sound, graphics etc, it's an amd based system, single core, MSI 7185 m'board. Everything has been reseated.

I would welcome any opinions and suggestions as to what I may have overlooked as a simple fix.


many thanks

 

Both sticks do not have errors when tested individually??

Have you tried moving both memory sticks to different slots (if physically possible)???

 

Yup, neither stick had errors when tested by themselves, however, it turns out that I could put them in different slots, I thought I was constrained to certain patterns/mixes if you know what I mean. And.. so far so good. (touch wood)

Thanks Dennis. I'll come back when I have a more certain result.

 

I'm glad it's working out, at least for now. Keep us posted.

 

sigh... still getting random reboots once -> twice a day, no consistant pattern and the dumps cite different causes each instance so it's upgrade time, the kit is rather long in the tooth. Ah, the joys of tracking down a new m'board/cpu/ram combo

Thanks for the suggestions

 

Cracked it!

OK, I knew it was something to do with memory as that was the common factor in all the diffent crashes. I did some more digging and ended up incrementing the voltage on my memory from 2.7v to 2.75v in the Bios. Stable as the Rock of Gibralter ever since! It's a pity that I only did this after ordering the new kit but as that is turning into a disaster I'll leave that story for another day....

BTW, I do not reccomend other people trying this if they have instability probs, not if they want to potentially fry their system, be it on your own head etc, etc.

cheers guys