Scots Taffer on 29/5/2010 at 13:42
Ok.
PC has been intermittently shitting itself. Sometimes fine, sometimes BSOD, sometimes nvlddmkm driver error, sometimes the red lines and pixellation until signal death.
Replaced RAM today, no dice. It's still dying.
I dig out my old 7800 and swap out my 8800. Problem solved.
So it seems the graphics card is the culprit... is there any other thing I need to check before doing the inevitable shopping list?
TBE on 29/5/2010 at 19:16
Hard drive. Backup your files to an external. Especially music and photos.
Then run a S.M.A.R.T. program of some sort. If your PC was built within the last 6 years or so, it should have a hard drive with S.M.A.R.T. monitoring enabled. This will tell you if there are tell-tale signs of the hard drive dying.
If you can't find a utility program from your drive's manufacturer, run a Live version of Ubuntu off of a CD/DVD. It has a utility program built in for drive monitoring. I actually use this a lot when I can't get a Windows-based OS booted up, and then Ubuntu tells me if the drive is ok or not.
Kthxbye
Scots Taffer on 29/5/2010 at 23:12
Curious, why do you suspect the hdd in this given the 24hr+ period without incident since I swapped cards.
I mean, I've backed up all my shit as a result of all this so I'll run a check disk type progr just for the hell of it, but I can't see why it would be an issue.
Al_B on 30/5/2010 at 00:52
Just a thought, but can you check the fan + heatsink connection on your graphics card? I had an issue recently with a fan where one of the plastic retaining screws had broken which led to high temperatures and crashes such as you're seeing - but it wasn't obvious at first glance.
Scots Taffer on 30/5/2010 at 10:12
Well, at the risk of missing any other tell-tale signs of problems and due to the fact that I rarely play any PC games, I'll leave the vid card upgrade for now and see how it progresses with my 7800 in tow.
Hit Deity on 1/6/2010 at 19:59
Eesh. I just went through an ordeal with a 5 year old PC. It was what I was using up until I just built my new system this last week.
Opened up the tired old dinosaur yesterday to clean out all the dust that had built up inside it to get it ready to hand down to one of the kids. Plugged it in and Pffft!! Pop!! and a spark arced from the wall to the plug. Thought at first that it was just a short (I had broken off a wireless mouse transceiver in one of the USB ports earlier that day) but when I opened the PSU, I could see that it was a miracle it hadn't died before.
Massive amounts of dust had seized up one of the fans, probably due to overheating, there were signs of old deterioration inside of it, and of course, the fuse was blown.
Now I know why it had been acting so strangely lately. Random crashes, lock-ups, poor performance... It's a good thing nothing else died in the system, because I opened up another problematic PC and robbed the PSU out of it (same brand, different model) and the system works fine now. But who knows how much wear and tear has been put on the rest of the components.
My point...you don't ever know what's failing (one or multiple problems), so it's a good, smart idea to check everything that you can.
Scots Taffer on 2/6/2010 at 01:34
Cheers. I will have a poke around the CPU/Fan/PSU at the weekend and see if there are any obvious signs of problems.
For now, no issues.
TBE on 3/6/2010 at 19:32
Quote Posted by Scots Taffer
... is there any other thing I need to check before doing the inevitable shopping list?
I was telling you to backup your media since you asked if there were any other things your should check, since hard drives tend to die around 5 years on some PCs.
