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Old 05-30-2009, 11:47 PM   #97
djgreedo
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Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: Perth, Australia
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What is the wattage of your power supply? It sounds like you are running a pretty high powered PC. I've had similar problems when using cheap power supplies. Anything less than 500W is probably not good enough. Do you have one of those CPUs that requires an extra 4-pin power connector? Do you have a powerful video card that requires its own connection to the power supply?

Also, if the power supply is low quality it can cause fluctuations in the power going into your mainboard (which would probably be even worse since you indicated your house has old wiring). A not so easy way to test it would be to plug it in at someone else's house, but that's an extremely inconvenient way to test it. Maybe you could make an effort to turn off all unneeded electrical devices (and unplug them) and see if the computer still crashes with minimal load on your electrical supply.

Although it seems almost certain to be a hardware/power issue, have you considered installing another OS (on a separate partition) to rule out software as the issue? It's time consuming, but might be worth a try. If it has the same problem on day 1 you can end the experiment right there. Windows 7 is available free at the moment (it will deactivate some time next year, so it's not totally free). Being based on Windows Vista it is inherently more stable than XP and will probably not suffer from driver problems.

You could try running with only 1 stick of RAM and see if that eliminates the problem. And switch the stick around if it still crashes. If all three (four?) sticks fail by themselves then you can almost rule out RAM as the problem since it is highly unlikely that all your RAM sticks will be faulty. But maybe the RAM socket is.
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