What kind of glitch is this?

[NotMyBest2Day]

I've been having some problems with 2k lately, and I have yet to figure out what the cause is. I'd like to believe my PSU is on it's way out. Aside from nVidia System Sentinel complaining all the time about how there's not enough power, I get either random BSODs or everything locks up because a file can't be found. It's almost always some DLL in the system32 folder, and I started actually reading the filename that the OS "can't find" and I figured out what is going on. For some reason, 2k seems to come up with the wrong character, so instead of looking for 'msvcrt.dll' it looks for 'msvcrt.lll' or it forgets the period or something. Then the same thing happens occasionally, too. In the C: drive, there'll be a directory called 'WINNTSystem32' because it forgot the \ .

Then another issue that has <b>just</b> shown up is that the system will just randomly restart like you press the reset button (it's not automatic reboot from a BSOD..that's the first checkbox I uncheck from a reinstall).

[Rudegar]

well if some driver have a bug which makes it try to acceess a lll file insted of a dll file
then it would BSOD faster then you can get dell to think about using amd once more just to preasure intel into lowering their prices :P

often looking at the BSOD can give you a clue which driver is the culpit

[NotMyBest2Day]

The Three BSODs I get are DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA, and KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED. I didn't have any problems with these before. It seems that the longer you use the same hardware, the less they cooperate with each other. I remember I used to have tons and tons of problems, then I changed CPU, mobo, and RAM and every problem went away, no BSODs at all, everything cooperated hard/software wise. Then after a few months, things started not cooperating and it keeps getting worse. Honestly, I think it's the PSU. The CPU/RAM is making glitches similar to being undervolted when OCing, but everything is at stock.

[Rudegar]

i would try memtest86+ to see if the memory could be at fault

guess it also could be the psu dust and dandruff could have killed it :P

[NotMyBest2Day]

My case stays clean and alllllmost dust-free on its own. It's weird. I've gone four months before and there was almost no dust in there. My parent's computer last night.....wow. Just for the heck of it I restarted and looked in BIOS to see temps, and their Athlon Thunderbird 1333 was at 60C....idle. I shut it off, opened it up, the HS fins had hair and dust packed halfway down inside the fins. I did a full cleaning in the entire thing, straightened cables up, and AS5'ed the CPU and lapped the HS. It's now at 44C @ 100% load. :D

Anyways, I want to hold off with buying a new PSU, because I've got a $450 order on Newegg that I'm waiting for my bank account to have enough to do it, and in the order is a new PSU. I only need $120 more and I've got it. So I'm just letting my rig run SETI while I live on the laptop for a few days/weeks.

[NotMyBest2Day]

Alright, I've run memtest for an hour.

<a href="http://www.lifelessempathy.net/misc/memtest_results.html" target="blank">Memtest results</a>

The top one is when I just let it do its thing with no intervention, and the bottom one is after it ran through and completed pass 0 for the Standard test, I put it on test 5 and let it keep running. The errors have yet to be duplicated, better yet, there haven't been errors.

[LiquidPsyrix]

I had a similar problem, with very similar errors as well.
Turns out my memory is so cheap I had to underclock my 3200+ to 2500+ and run the memory 1:1 at DDR333. It's not that bad of a performance drop and now the RAM runs at 2-2-2-6 with %100 stability. Time to invest in a better PSU & RAM for me, but your system seems to just need the PSU replaced.

-LiquidPsyrix-

[NotMyBest2Day]

I've got good RAM, so that's not it. There's no consistency in "bad spots", so that rules out bad memroy. I've got Ballistix, that's pretty high up in performance and quality.

Right now, my PSU is the one that came with the case, and is a "Just PC, USA" PSU, made by Channel Well Technology. It's been pretty strong and stable for the past two years, but I just think it's on its way out. I'm going to upgrade to a Rosewill.