Do I have faulty memory ????

[Kocky]

Hello guys,

The following problem:

A couple of weeks ago I upgraded my system.
CPU: AMD ATHLON 2400+
MOBO: ASUS A7V8X
MEM: 256 mb DDR PC2600
HARD DISK: MAXTOR 60gig 7200 rpm/ IDE133
VIDEO: GeForce 2 MX 400 32 mb
OS: WINDOWS XP PROF.

No problem until last week.
Then I got random system restarts while I was just playing a game or browsing the Internet.

Now when I try to run Warcraft 3 for example I get the following message:

This application has encountered a critical error:

FATAL ERROR!

Program: D:\games\Warcraft III\Warcraft III\War3.exe
Exception: 0xC0000005(ACCESS_VIOLATION) at 001b:6DF08F84

The instruction at '0x6DF08F84' referenced memory at '0xC13B0CC4'.
The memory could not be 'written'.

Pres OK to terminate the application.

Is this a memory issue ?
I already formated my hard-disk and reinstalled everything.
Thanx in advance for the replies.

Greetings,

Kocky.

 

[smah]

It cetainly sounds like it. Check event viewer for more information about this error to help narrow it down. Start, Run, eventvwr.msc

 

[rew]

had the same problem with the same mobo as you! crap board get a n abit or a gigabyte board

 

[Kocky]

Does anybody know a good program to test if your memory is faulty ?

 

[smah]

This one's pretty good:

http://www.simmtester.com/PAGE/products/doc/docinfo.asp

 

[Kocky]

I solved the problem.
It was my hard-disk.

About a week ago I was reinstalling Windows XP but then the computer lost power (had something todo with my girlfriends shoe and a power cord) and turned off. I then restarted the computer and continued the installation. After that all the trouble began. I downloaded the memtest application which smah suggested. My dimm came out OK. Finally I let scandisk check my whole hard disk and let it correct any errors automaticly. When I came back the pc was running and I haven't had any problems since.

A collegue at work told that when playing for example a game and the internal memory is full then the hard disk is used for swopping and seen by the system as external memory. When the game tries to write something to this external memory and this fails, due to a bad sector or another hard-disk problem, it will report this as a memory error or even reboots the pc bacause it can't make a memory dump.

To make a long story short:

Problem solved !

Thanx for your help. This helped me to pin-point the problem.

Pascal.