Hello,

I recently assembled a new PC for myself. The parts were as follows:

Intel Pentium Core 2 Duo E6550
2 Gb Crucial Ballistix PC2-6400
MSI p35 Platinum
Corsair 620 Watt Power Supply Unit
eVGA nVidia 8800 GTS 320 Mb
Western Digital Caviar 320 Gb SATA
Hitachi Deskstar 250 Gb SATA
Lite On 20X DVD-RW Drive SATA
Gigabyte 3D Aurora Tower
Windows XP Professional

I've assembled PCs before, so this would be no big deal, right? Wrong. I formatted the drive and did a clean install of XP. After XP booted up, I installed all the usual stuff (chipset drivers, sound drivers, video drivers, etc.) Once the PC was actually up and running, I noticed some odd behavior. For one, any Windows Media Video files would either crash WMP (ver. 11) or crash the entire system. Also, any games would crash to the desktop (Guild Wars or Titan Quest). There were also a few random program crashes here and there.

First thing that I thought was it was time to update the MSIs BIOS, as the one I had was fairly old. I flashed to the newest BIOS (1.4) and my system would no longer boot. I then read on another computer that the new BIOS was wildly unstable. After awhile I was able to flash to the earlier BIOS and get back into XP. My pea brain then thought "Hmmm this board is kind of buggy. That must be why things are crashing!" So, I ordered a new motherboard.

ASUS P5K-E Wi-fi/AP Edition

I completely reinstall all my components with the new board and do a frest install of XP. I fire up the things that were causing errors (.wmvs, games) and sure enough, they still crashed.

Now that I knew it wasn't my board, I started to look at my video card. I read online that the drivers could be an issue, as could the temperature and such. I experimented with various drivers (official and modded) and used various programs to modify my temperatures. Temps were normal and the drivers didn't fix anything. I also tried various codecs to see if maybe that's why WMP was crashing, but no, nothing fixed it.

This convinced me my video card was to blame, so I ordered another video card.

MSI Radeon HD2600XT Diamond

Again, I did a clean install of XP and installed the newest drivers. I run some videos and games and BOOM they crash just as always.

Now I'm looking at my other components. My Power Supply Unit was from a previous build and I have never had any isses with it (in fact, it replaced a buggy PSU and fixed my system). The PSU is only a couple of months old. My RAM is also only a few months old (like 2) and I have ran various memory tests and they were fine. The timings and voltages were also set appropriately. That leaves my primary hard drive. I drive over to the store and picked up another identical drive. I install XP AGAIN and experience the exact same issues. Just tonight, I put in my old hard drive with XP still on it. I then cleaned out the old drivers and installed the new ones. Ran some videos and CRASH.

I'm now running out of ideas. This is basically a list of everything I've tried:
2 different motherboards
2 different graphic cards
2 different hard drives
2 different sets of ram
With/without optical drive
Different verions of XP (home/pro)
Vista (same problems)
Various BIOS settings
Reseating CPU
Reapplying thermal paste and cooler
Reinstalled DirectX 9.0c

Basically, any Windows Media Video will crash either WMP 11 or the entire system. Games will also play fine for a minute or two and crash to either the desktop or just restart. I've ran various stress tests and passed them all. Most other normal PC things like internet surfing, email, itunes, etc. all work fine. No matter what I do, I can't seem to get the aforementioned things working.

Please, I'm at wit's end. Could someone suggest something I might be overlooking? I need to get this machine working properly and buying and returning all these parts is getting very expensive.

Thank you in advance.

-Jeff

Hi Murdocke,

Weclome to PCHF, and yes this is a strange one indeed.

As far as the primary physical compnents of your machine I can only suspect the CPU now, it seems, however, I don't want to jump the gun yet and recommend purchasing new hardware until I've mulled this over.

I suggest for now, doing a clean install with ONLY your CPU, RAM, CDROM, one hardrive, your keyboard, and your mouse installed.

First, run a clean install, don't install any drivers. Try running the following: One WMV format movie, one MPEG format movie, and if your optical drive is a DVDROM, try running a DVD movie. Make sure these are running in WMP 9 (or 10 if you have it installed already, but not 11). Also, try running these in Winamp or another media player to see if the same thing happens. Note, these movies are probably going to look like poo since we have no drivers installed. You also may not be able to play the DVD.

If all goes well, try then installing your chipset driver, restart, and repeat the above tests.

If all goes well, install your sound drivers, restart, repeat. Then, video drivers, restart repeat. Keep adding only one thing at a time. After all that, start adding some of your additional hardware and the corresponding drivers. Then run windows update (make sure you have SP2 installed before you install your network card/drivers or IMMEDIATELY after if it's already integrated in your version of XP).

Keep us posted as to where the problem starts to resurface. If the exact same error happens before installing anything then we may have to look at that CPU. Don't fret too much if you get different errors regarding DirectX or initialization as the lack of sound and video hardware.

Thank you for your response. Here's what happened...

So I installed a fresh copy of XP on my drive's second partition. Upon entering the desktop, I immediately opened some videos. To my surprise, the .WMV files I've been using for testing played fine. I let the video loop a few times until I was satisfied that it wouldn't crash.

I then installed the Intel chipset drivers and restarted. Upon reboot, I ran the video again. No problems. So I installed the ethernet driver and rebooted. Ran the video again...no problems.

Finally, I downloaded the latest nVidia 8800 GTS drivers from their site and installed them. Upon reboot, I ran the video again and...it crashed. The only adjustment I made was setting the screen resolution to 1280 by 1024.

This would probably indicate there is something fishy going on with either the video card and/or the drivers. However, the thing that puzzles me is I have a second video card sitting here that I had previously tested. It's a Radeon, so it's completely different from the other card. It crashed just in the same way that the nVidia did.

Where should I go from here? Might there be some sort of PCIE setting in BIOS that is off? I feel a little better narrowing down the problem a little, but I'm still kind of lost.

Thank you in advance for your help.

-Jeff