Topic: My computer died

[idolminds]

ugh. I shut it off before going to work which was out of town for 2 days. Now I come home and windows starts but then I get a big scary error and it begins dumping memory to disk. Im guessing my RAM went bad.

So Ill be limited for a while until I can fix it or use this as an excuse to build a new PC. I just need to save everything I can off the old drive. I can get into safe mode ok.


EDIT

It says something about uninstalling recent drivers or programs. I couldnt think of anything except Dawn of Discovery...which comes with TAGES driver. If that fucked things up, Im going to be pissed.

[MysterD]

Oh, man - that freakin' sucks!

[Cools!]

Oh noes!

[Pugnate]

Oh, man- that freakin' sucks!

[Cobra951]

That's my fear every time I power this old thing back up after being absent a few days.  Sorry, man.  Hope it revives soon.

[idolminds]

Well, luckily I can get into safe mode and am able to burn DVDs, so Im tracking down all the stuff I want to keep. Once thats done I'll try run this memtest program to see if my RAM is ok. If that doesnt work, I'll try reformatting.

[idolminds]

Hmmm...thats interesting. I spent an hour or so burning DVDs in safe mode and then rebooted to try this memory test program. I never got it to boot, so it went right to windows...and this time it didnt crash. I bet some piece of hardware is temp sensitive and needed to warm up first. Now it seems ok.

The fun part now is figuring out which part...

[scottws]

That's how my southbridge was.  If I had the PC off a few days, it wouldn't boot and I'd have to reboot it a bunch before it worked.  But when it did it usually would work for weeks straight.

[idolminds]

I don't know if its a hardware thing or not anymore. I installed something that needed a reboot, I figured it would be quick and my PC was already "warmed up" so there shouldn't be a problem. I was wrong. So I just shut it all down and went to bed.

This morning I decide to try it again. Took me a few tries to get into safe mode (for some reason it wasn't doing anything when I hit F8). Once I got it safe mode I uninstalled what I thought might be causing problems, namely Dawn of Discovery. Its the only thing I could think of that I'd installed again to make the problem happen. Since I was in the Add/Remove Programs thing anyway I looked for things I wasnt using anyway. I tried to uninstall L4D2 but it tried to launch Steam...which wouldn't run in safe mode so all that did was lock me out of A/RP. Windows couldnt shut down the Steam program so when I went to restart windows, even in safe mode, wouldnt shut down properly. So I hit the reset button.

Windows came up and promptly crashed again. So...back to safe mode.

This time I didnt do much of anything. I copied a bunch of icons off my desktop...dont know how it would help but I was thinking "Its crashing during load, maybe its trying to load too many icons or something?". Anyway, I was able to do a clean restart from safe mode and the regular mode came back up. So now I'm thinking...maybe thats it? Because thats what I did last time it worked, I was backing up stuff in safe mode and then did a restart and it came back up fine.

So maybe its not hardware and its some weird windows thing. I should probably reformat and reinstall XP. Or pick up W7.