Real big (ram) problem

[unguarded_instinct]

[brad]

What is the error message?
If you truely feel like it's the Ram try your stick(s) in another machine or try different sticks in yours.
You could be getting "crosstalk" on you IDE cables also. The solution to crosstalk is to separate the cables by a few inches, or replace the standard IDE cables with UDMA 80-pin cables.
See if you can get the error message.
brad

[unguarded_instinct]

Some errors include, from winrar, winace: CRC error, and the file(s) will not extract. Blue screens, i get KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED and usually it's a .sys file, like ntoskrnl.sys or smililar. Recently, about 5 minutes ago i got an IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. theres a few more that i've gotten, i just don't know them off the top of my head. thanx for your help brad, and anyone else who does

[brad]

Did you try the Ram suggestion?
brad

[unguarded_instinct]

well the other pc's i have use SDRam, and i only have 1 512 stick in DDR.

[unguarded_instinct]

I just got another Blue screen, i was trying to play Max Payne 2, and near the end of the level load i got a PFN_LIST_CORRUPT error.

[lazygun]

I would look up the STOP error code or the error message on Microsoft's knowledge base, as they 'sometimes' have some decent troubleshooting steps.

Here's one for the PFN_LIST_CORRUPT error, although there are 2 other hits and one does reference games

http://support.microsoft.com/default.as ... -us;291806

[teststrips]

the two times you mentioned that your pc crashed were both high load CPU functions. Have you tried looking at your system temps in the bios or via a system monitoring program? If this problem has slowly creeped up on you, you might have dust plugging up your heatsink, or a dead or dying fan. If it's always worked this way (badly) I'd suppose either an incorrectly mounted heatsink (did you use thermal grease?), bad hardware (cpu, motherboard or ram) or a BIOS setting. You could easily boot into your bios and use the "load failsafe settings" option and see if your machine runs any more stable.