a few issues

[socialsupernova]

Ok I built a computer a few weeks ago and have seemed to have a plethora of problems.

My 160 gig external hard drive was completely full so I bought another 250 gig one to contrast my 74 gig 10,000 rpm HD. After working out a few initial kinks with my 1st build I installed windows. After installing programs and moving files over I started to realize my files all started to get weird. Applications would tell me they are not valid win 32 files but worked on any other computers except mine. After a few days I started to see the folder and files named begin to change. It seemed that everything had a "~1" kinda thin at the end of its title. I tried to update windows xp and it was saving the updates in my external. The only strange think I can think of was my new external HD was being recognized and a local disk F. Maybe my computer is reading it wrong? None the less I formatted the whole thing the other day but am still totally bent about it.

On top of that my computer randomly shuts down. It's not really that random but it’s far from predictable. It usually happened right before something significant happened. Right after I open a game or right after I finish extracting of downloading something. Once my computer comes back on it sends an error report and it says something about a blue screen and video device drivers. I have had bad ram that has given me a blue screen during counter-strike but I don’t get anything. I am willing to bet I need to update my video card drivers but can finding anything more recent for my 7900 GT than what game with the board. Maybe it’s too hot?


This afternoon I bought Fear right before I went to work and am really excited to play. I know if I dont come home with some answers that game will probably crash too much for me to install it. What do you guys suggest I do?

[socialsupernova]

I have updated my drivers for my video card but things are still crashing. I went to my control panel and checked out my system. It says I have 2.87 gigs of ram installed but when I check it out in my bios it says I have 4 1 gig sticks installed. I downloaded some program called memtest68 and burned it to a cd but I couldn't figure it out. It just ran a bunch of tests. It showed my Ram configuartaion and L1 was 16 and L2 was 2048 so I'm starting to think I am having serious ram issues. is there any way to confirm this?

[makisushi]

It would help to know your system specs.
Motherboard (bios version), ram, etc.

Also, Did you install the programs, or just copy them from the other drive?

[socialsupernova]

http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?t=158488

[blue60007]

Yes, if you have 4 gigs of RAM installed the standard 32bit version of Windows can't use over something like 2.75GB-3.25GB depending on what all you have installed.

As far as L1 and L2 it sounds like you have an Intel CPU of some sort. L1 and L2 are the CPU caches - not related to your system RAM. The 6xx series has 16KB of L1 cache and 2048KB (or 2MB) of L2 cache.

Just for giggles, I would try running the system with 2GB of RAM only. Perhaps the board is struggling with 4GB. It's worth a whirl.

Are you still using that $35 power supply?