Computer Keeps Restarting

Hmmm... Turn down hardware accelaration for your graphics card a couple notches if it's set to max. Display Properties -> Settings -> Advanced -> Troubleshoot

My video card doesn't like some video formats and will BSOD me if the hardware accelaration is too high. Don't know if it's an issue with bad RAM on the card or drivers, but I haven't had issues since I've done this.

 

Worked a treat! Just bought some new RAM now thanks to that software. :thumbsup:

yakumo

 

How do you find what the correct voltage for the RAM is? All CPU-Z will tell you is what it's running at currently, isn't that right?

 

Guys,

Don't forget that bad sectors on the hard drive should have nothing to do with bad RAM.

BUT... on the other hand, bad sectors can cause crashes if they are in the page file and you try to swap data back into RAM from the page file.

If you still crash after swapping RAM and if your power supply is OK (and properly sized) then I'd lean towards replacing the hard drive.

All the hard drives in the past 10+ years have extra sectors on them that are hidden. They have the intelligence to automatically map out bad sectors and use those hidden sectors to hold the data. It's called defect reallocation. When that table fills up you'll start to see the hard drive errors show up in the logs. Your drive is already on its way out.

RJ

 

If this happens, user mode applications get an exception and will most likely (due to most apps not handling such errors) be terminated; no blue screen is displayed in this case. However, for kernel mode code, you will get either a KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR or KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR blue screen, not the random ones la-li-lu-le-lo got. That is, provided the system is still healthy enough to display the blue screen .

I think to remember that automatic reallocation does only happen for writes. If you try to read a bad sector, the drive won't have the original data to reallocate it, so the operation should simply fail. However, there seem to be some drives with broken firmware that don't get this right. Upon reading a defect sector, the firmware will notice the error and try to read it again; this behaviour is expected, though. However, what is not expected is that some drives retry indefinitely, thus hanging the system.