[Solved] not sure what's going on

Power supply....classic psu failure.

 

No changes were made. This is random to me.

 

I thought of this thread today, I got her working. Twas the PSU and a stick of RAM that went bad. Thank you very much for all your help and support! I will not forget this forum.

Actually had another question. I was looking in to a potential mother board upgrade. Or perhaps just building a whole new computer in general. Where do I even start? My main concern would be if I were to upgrade my motherboard (To include the CPU, and all other encompassing parts) how would I know if it would fit my case? Or if the ports on the back will all line up? Is this something you can tweak?

 

We need to know whether your case is mid size or micro or even full size to answer that. Can you show us the case?
Motherboards come the same way as full size or micro being the most common. Lately micros have been a favorite in a mid size case
because that gives more room to sort out bigger size video cards, extra wires etc....your motherboard is an AM3 but your cpu is an AM2+ so be careful whatever board you buy will also take the AM2+ cpu. Your ram should work also as most newer boards are still taking Ddr3 ram as well, b ut of course the real question is what wold you be gaining. Upgrading a board doesn't give you that much change and neither does a cpu. Double the memory and you have something or change the architecture totally on cpu with a big memory change. I would stay with what you have until you are ready for a real upgrade so that you see a big difference.

 

Oh the irony. It seems I have not made it out of the woods yet. Tonight, as I was happily playing league of legends, my computer crashed twice. I wasn't exactly sure why. I DO know that I had just bought another stick of RAM. I went from the original 4 Gb that I had in the original post (Post PSU-replacement) to 6gb a few weeks ago. Just tonight, I picked up another 2gb stick of the same brand as the last, and installed it. Then the crashes occurred. I ran a memory diagnostic, nothing turned up.

Then my computer reverted to its old ways. It became completely non-responsive like last time. Everything seems to power up just fine. But when that particular stick of RAM is plugged in to the board, it doesn't seem to work. Is my rig shorting sticks out? Because this problem happened in combination with the original PSU failing. I really don't know what to make of this. I am going to return the stick I bought today, and get another.

Also, I believe the source of the crashes are these errors:

Critical 6/8/2014 9:34:12 PM Kernel-Power 41 (63)
Critical 6/8/2014 9:03:50 PM Kernel-Power 41 (63)
Critical 6/8/2014 8:27:45 PM Kernel-Power 41 (63)

The first two were blue screens.
Error messages being (In chronological order): USB_BUG_COD,
and, IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

The other just froze my machine up. So, I removed the supposed bad stick of RAM, (booted up like normal) and updated my Realtek audio driver, and my graphics driver. Some folk on some other forums have related problems of the like to those drivers. I also tried fiddling with the RAM a bit. I removed a stick that I knew to be working, and replaced it with the problematic one, which resulted in the non-responsiveness. Concluding that it was indeed the stick of RAM causing that. But why?

Since the updates, and the removal of the RAM, I have been unable to recreate the crash. I do not want to go in to league of legends to do it, because leaving so many matches can result in your account being banned. So I will toy around with it, and see if I can get the crash to happen again. Any ideas here gents?

 

RichM knows a lot more than I do about RAM, however to help him can you tell us the full details of the existing and working RAM sticks, plus the same about this new one that is causing the problems, there may well be a mismatch problem.

Nev.

 

This is a common mistake actually and it is becoming more and more a reality. The only way to practically add ram these days to be certain of compatibility it to buy it all at the same time and ram is cheap enough to make that easy.
There are way too many variables the least important of which is speed yet most people thing that any two Ddr3 1600 sticks by Corsair are a match. Truth of the matter is Corsair makes nothing so even if they were the same model number unless they were the same vin # they aren't the same anyway and probably aren't even the same manufacturer no less. You need to match way more than speed and finding the info is way too difficult. The only time the same make and model will be the same is if you buy from someone who makes their own ram. 25 brands and 4 manufacturers so good luck. That is one of the reason we always suggest using a site like www.crucial.com configurator because they do all the matching for you. You can buy the Crucial from anyone but get the exact model # the site suggests or its a "crapshoot"! Very few sites list the density of the ram or cas latency and also even ECC factor but all those are what determines if ram is compatible.

Another thing you need to consider is dual channel ram requiring the exact same ram in matched slots that with 6 Gb you probably are going against anyway and using a dual channel board working against the dual channel can eat back most of your increase anyway.

 

What am I to do then? Like I said, I was going to return the stick of RAM that I got, and replace it. I'm not sure whether or not my board is dual channel or not. I thought I changed dependent on what arrangement you had your board in. What I do know is that the jump from 4gb to 6gb was dramatic, to say the least. I just don't understand why it would do it in such a delayed fashion. The first two sticks of RAM are unknown to me.

News today: I put that same problem stick of RAM in (The computer had been off all night). The machine seemed to boot, but ended up freezing at different points along the way after several tries.

Confused.

 

My question I guess would be why didn't the crashes happen after I put the 3rd stick of RAM in. Because the 4th was exactly the same as the 3rd. Same brand, same specs.

 

Not using Dual Channel will not cause Bsods or errors it simply won't run as well. You need to cut back to the sticks that work best for now and wait until you can replace all at one time which I feel like you are saying you can't do now, and that is perfectly understandable. You will have a much easier time buying all at once and using just one model. In other words "piling in" sticks usually does more harm than good as you are seeing.

 

That wouldn't be very cost effective. XD I'll see what I can come up with. Thank you guys for all your support.