Boot up errors and gaming problems.

[street8]

Hi there I'm looking for some advice on my pc which is experiencing various difficulties. First of all I should mention that I put this pc together myself a while ago now, and there has been the odd teething trouble as well as a major problem with the hard drive which required a complete re-install. That was some time ago now though and the new problems are confusing me and I'm not sure as how to go about solving them.

These are the problems which have developed over the last month or so.....

The first problem came from the psu which was making a clicking noise, this turned out to be it's fan which had someone worked itself loose. I have managed to fix this, sort of.

The second and more annoying problem is that occasionally when booting up I get a CMOS error saying that the time and date settings have been reset, I have managed to work around this by simply re-imputting the correct date in the BIOS. The only thing I can think of is that the battery is knackered but it is less than two years old.

The third problem also occurs on startup, quite often when I turn the pc on for the first time in the morning, the computer will throw up various error messages about missing or corrupt files. Some of those I have written down are windows root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe, hal.dll and windows/system32/config system. There has also been one occasion when it didn't actually list what the faulty file was. I am advised to repair these files using the windows disc. I haven't tried doing this, instead a few resets gets me to the Windows screen and beyond without a hitch.

The fourth and so far final problem is that all of a sudden my computer has taken offence to playing games. It will start to load the game but it doesn't get very far before the pc resets itself. Now these games aren't graphically intensive, we're not talking F.E.A.R here. Indeed I have played these games plenty of times on this system without any problems. I tried updating the drivers and this did work for one day, however it is now back to it's tricks again. I'm not sure if this is a problem with the graphics card, software or a problem that is inter-linked with the above problems.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Schmidget]

You're not the only one with computer problems right now (USB is a flawed design)

Anyway, the almighty blue screen may be the culprit behind your uncalled-for automatic restarts. Gaming usually pushes your PC to the max and can show all sorts of weaknesses - especially for RAM, cooling, and driver issues. One really wrong turn of events can send the PC spiraling out of control until it completely crashes forcing a restart. But then again, you said they weren't games like F.E.A.R. or Half-Life 2 (although that's a little dated now). That makes me think of either a driver issue or maybe a RAM issue. Cooling? Maybe, but if you aren't doing anything stressful on the hardware, and you never had that kind of problem before then I don't think so.

What will really give a clue to this mystery would be to disable automatic restart. Just right-click on My Computer -> click properties -> click the Advanced tab -> click Settings under the Startup and Recovery heading -> and uncheck "Automatically Restart." -> OK out of the windows.

Now, try and do something that would normally trigger an automatic restart and take note of the error number and the driver mentioned if any.

If your computer just automatically restarts even though you unchecked that box, then we have a different problem on our hands altogether.

Do that stuff, and report back your findings.

As for the missing or corrupt file errors, I don't know. It might be related to the random restarts, or a failing hard drive, or a virus. Done any virus scans lately? I hate to blame things on viruses, but just because I never seem to get any, doesn't mean other people don't.

[street8]

Hi Schmidget, thanks very much for your swift reply and advice.

I will give that a try in a few moments, just need to check my mail. I did have the "windows root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe" one again this morning on the second restart, on the first restart nothing happened at all,the pc came on but there was no display and the green "on" light of the monitor flashed as if there was no signal.

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Ok, I did as you said and tried Pro Evolution Soccer 6 (one of only two games I have on the pc atm) and it worked fine. So I then tried re-enabling automatic restarts and loaded the game again, and it worked this time also. I then loaded up Americas Army and this worked too. Odd, it seems to be working intermittently or something?

As for viruses I have Norton Internet Security and that hasn't found anything recently, but I will run a full scan later just to check. I frequently run Spyware Doctor which hasn't found any viruses, only cookies, adware and such, all of which get deleted. I also recently installed TuneUp Utilities 2007 and 1-click maintenance hoping that they would find and repair any registry faults. As you can probably tell, the software side of things is were I tend to fall down.

[street8]

Hmmm I just played Pro Evo 6 again and managed one match, but after the game, whilst in the master league panel, the pc reset itself. I had disabled automatic restarts beforehand. I got no error messages the pc just simply restarted as if nothing had happened.

[Schmidget]

It restarted without giving you a BSOD? This is a different issue. I'm thinking the culprit could be either the PSU or your temps getting too high. How are your voltages and temps (graphics card/CPU)?

[street8]

At normal "idle" levels or during game play?

Current idle values are :

cpu = 51C
MB = 43C
+12v = around 11.9 -12.0
+5v = around 5.0
+3v = around 2.9
VCore = 1.344

Is there any way to find out the graphics card temp?

No there was no error messages or anything, it just restarted and no error messages on startup. Could it be dust causing these problems? It has been a few months since I cleaned the insides.

[Schmidget]

Well, your temps and voltages both seem fine. I'm going to ask this just to satisfy some personal curiosity. How many USB devices do you have plugged in?

Back to the task at hand, using the Hardware Monitoring on [url=http://www.guru3d.com/article/atitraytools/189/]ATI Tray Tools[\url] is a good way to view your GPU temp. It shouldn't idle at a temp much higher that your CPU. However, graphics cards can handle a little more heat you just don't want to push it.

It might be a good idea to clean out your comp if it's full of dust. It's not a good idea to have it collecting all over you mobo and inside your PSU, fans, heatsinks, etc. Just give it all a good spray with compressed air. You shouldn't do this but I usually use a shop vac and suck out some of the dust in mine. It's not a good idea to do that because all of that moving air can generate quite a bit of static electricity and the fans that start moving generate quite a bit of electricity on their own. If you want to use a vac, make sure it a low power portable one. Don't use a cloth to clean the insides, that's a static hazard also.

[street8]

Right, this morning on boot up I had the usual missing/corrupt file messages but two reboots and I got to the windows page, however I was then greeted by the dreaded blue screen. The error was reported as "IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL". I took a note of it and restarted and this time it loaded successfully but I was greeted by the windows error reporting box. This advised that it had just recovered from a serious error. I decided to send the error report and this loaded up a web page Microsoft Windows Error Reporting which suggests that the problem was caused by anti virus software.

As for USB devices, there is a mouse, keyboard and game pad converter, that's it. I've downloaded and installed the ATi tray tool but can't find a GPU temp anywhere.

[Schmidget]

Last time I saw that error, it was a RAM issue. Download memTest86+. Burn the CD image to a CD. Insert the CD, restart the computer, boot from the CD. And run the memory test for a few passes to see if you have any errors.

[spikeyredcactus]

i had that same message, it turned out my RAM wasnt seated proberly. Once i had put it in properly my computer seemed stable but memtest still reported arrors and some games were jerky at times and some reported bad ram so youve proberly done what i did.....take it back to where you bough it from and tell them it was like that when you bought it lol coz youve almost certainly damaged it.

[street8]

Which one of those memtest86+ downloads do I want?

And spikeyrecactus I don't think the RAM is under warranty anymore, it's probably almost 2 years old now.

By the way I just played a game and there are yellow digits in the top right of the screen, are these the GPU temps? Highest number it got to was 60. It fluctauted quite a bit between 30 and 60 during gameplay.

[Schmidget]

I'm thinking those yellow digits are your framerate. You'd want the latest MemTest 86+ ISO image. You need to use CD burning software to burn the ISO to the disc. Now, that doesn't mean physically burn the ISO file to a disc, but rather burn the ISO in a sense that the contents of that ISO are on the disc. This disc will be bootable, so insert the disc into the drive and restart the computer. You should be able to boot from that disc once the computer turns back on before windows starts. The rest is pretty self explanatory.

If what I said makes no sense, which wouldn't surprise me because it came out totally wrong, go here for an actual guide to using memtest.

[street8]

Right sorry for the delay in getting round to updating the situation. Been busy lately and just haven't found the time to sit down and solve this.

I cleaned the pc out so that should eliminate the dust theory at least. Since then there has hardly been any error messages on boot up except the CMOS resetting itself every time the psu is turned off. I suspect this is due to a dodgy battery. I'm sure the jumper cap is on in the correct place according to the motherboard manual.

Gaming has become impossible again and the pc restarts with no error message displayed at all, and that's with automatic restarts disabled.

Last night I downloaded the latest memtest and ran it on a floppy. It ran for over two hours (at which point I had two passes and no errors). Then it seemed to restart (the timer was reset) and I think it was testing with cache on. Unfortunately the pc gave up during this phase (I think it overheated) and would turn on but there was no display on the monitor. I gave it a few minutes and then retried and it came on but there was an "overclocking error/warning" message that came up (which I put down to overheating since I have never overclocked it at all and the setting are all default). Is it worth running the memtest again?