Torture test
 

:confused: I lately had some instability issues with my system it randomly freezes, so i ran Prime95 and it found an error but i don't know what it is.

My system:
K7SEM mobo with latest BIOS
Athlon Xp 2100+
20gig Hdd
Geforce 4 Ti 4200
standard floppy
standard 50x cdrom
Lg burner
400W PSU
Onboard sound and onboard lan

:confused: Can somebody help me please!!

I have an Athlon 1200 that would lockup randomly,
then I found a correlation, when the room temp was in the
mid 70's F it was more likely to lockup.

I removed the case walls and dropped the clock speed
down to 1180, it is stable now.

Sometimes if you walk around you can pick up a static
charge which can cause a lockup.

Almost forgot, I cleaned out the CPU heatsink and fan and the heatsink and fan on some other chip next to the CPU.

That lowered the CPU temp.

:confused: I check my temp right when my pc froze and the temp was 38C for the cpu and the system temp was around 41C. So i don't really think it's overheating. I tried lowering the fsb before
and it stil locked up, so i don't know what else to do. :down:

I think that it's my ram that maybe the problem but i recently got a new one so I think it's hard for the ram to be the problem, because a lot of people told me it's the ram that causing the lock-ups.

I did ran memtest 3 times and it froze the 3 times at around the same test and the around the same time. So i thoughth how would my pc froze during memtest which i thought it was weird:confused: . I just want to get rid of this random freeze problem.

If you think it is the RAM, try [url=http://www.memtest86.com/]Memtest86[/url] for a few hours.

EDIT: nevermind, I must be blind.

If it has more than one stick of RAM try with just one do the tests and then try with the others. That could identify a bad stick.

Sometimes with multiple sticks the one that maps to the higher addresses could be marginal and only when alot of RAM gets allocated does the marginal RAM get heavy access and then the problems occur.

I have also seen a motherboard where one of the RAM slots had a problem.

If you have multiple sticks but they aren't identical,
the lowest rated one's abilities is supposed to prevail,
but if they are supposedly the same speed but one just barely
makes it the settings may be to aggressive for the weakest stick
to handle.

it's only a one stick 512mb ram and i did ran memtest and it froze all the time on the same test and around the same time.

So does that mean my ram is bad?:down:

[QUOTE][i]Originally posted by Zydot [/i]
[B]So does that mean my ram is bad?
[/B][/QUOTE]

Not necessarily.

I had a case just like that, where Memtest always made the box freeze on the same test and around the same time. The problem turned out to be the motherboard -- the RAM is working just fine in another motherboard (same make). It passes Memtest just fine with the new motherboard.

It is bad or not able to handle the current settings or less likely a driver issue.

If your bios allows, write down the current settings and try changing the CAS value, some BIOSes allow changing other parameters.

Just in case there is some very odd interaction between some
driver try running the computer in Safe mode (if you are using
some version of windows) and try the tests.

Safe mode uses different drivers so if there is a bug in the regular one then the safe mode driver should work OK.