Stop: error help 0x0000009c 1

[gorzonking]

Hi there i am having the most enoying time with my pc right now and i wondered if anyone might no how to resolve this.
I recently put together a new pc and every time i go to play a game, it throughs back this stop message at me:

Stop: 0x0000009c (0x00000004, 0x80545ff0, 0xb2000000, 0x00070f0f).

It sometimes dosent happen strait away and sometimes it's not untill 10min's or so into a game.

My Pc Specs are:
Case/Power---Viper ATX,500w Built in.
Mobo---------ECS KV2 extreme
Memory-------1x 512mb (unsure on make).
Sound--------built in
Video Card---Geforce fx5700 256mb
Processer----AMD 64 3500+ 939
O/S----------Windows xp, service pack 2
Hardrive-----Maxtor 6 200GB SCSI SATA
Network ad---Motorola SURFboard SB5100 USB cable Modem

This didn't seem to happen before i instaled service pack 2 or when i had no broadband conection.
I have downloaded quite a few things since and dont no if it could be a virus or somethinng?.
I have norton 2004 and it has the latest updates and a system scan dosent show anything.

Please please could someone help me out. :-(

 

[Crowley16]

is this happening for all games or just a single game?

--------------------
Procrastinate Now!

 

[Taed]

That is an MCE, Machine Check Exception, which essentially means that the CPU microcode "crashed". Usually, it's an unfixed bug in the CPU -- I've run into them about 5 times over the last 5 years looking after a network of 5000 machines, so they're pretty rare.

Once you decode what the MCE means, you'd look in the CPU eratta to see which of the known bugs it is. Sometimes there's a fix for it that you can do something about, such as in an upgraded BIOS or microcode.

The MCE code that you have is 0xb200000000070f0f, but I only know how to translate that for Pentiums (not AMD), and the codes are CPU family-specific.

For example, for a Pentium 4, we would use Appendix E from IA-32 Intel® Architecture Software Developer's Manual, Volume 3: System Programming Guide, which can be found at ftp://download.intel.com/design/Pentium4/manuals/25366814.pdf.

You need to find an equivalent document for your AMD part, or call AMD support.

 

[gorzonking]

First of all, hi Crowley16 and Taed thanx for your responces. i hope you can help me.

To Crowley16

This happens on all games that iv'e try'ed Rollercoaster tycoon 3, Half-Life 2 and Counter Strike source.
I think that it only happens on 3D games or power hungry games but if i play windows games like pinball, card's etc i have no problem.

To Taed

I hope it's not that because i would'nt no where to start but when I first built the computer and got it going, it did'nt seem to have anything wrong with it but unfortunatley i had to start over.
The second time i instaled windows i put broadband on along with SP 2 and thats when i started getting problems.

Somebody else in this forum did have the same STOP message as i did, but it all came down to a faulty network card but i only have a modem that came with my broadband service.

 

[Taed]

I found that other person's post:

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=952337

I searched Google and Usenet for anyone else with that same MCE code, and you two are the only ones! Shocking!

Well, I'd start by making sure that you have the newest BIOS for your motherboard. Probably 1/3 of MCE errors are fixed with newer CPU microcode.

As far as the next step, if it's reproducible, I'd unplug as much hardware as you can, such as your modem, CD-ROMs, etc., and then try to reproduce it. If you can't, add them in one-by-one until you figure out which is the naughty one.

I'm amazed that the other person's issue was due to their wireless card. An MCE error is typically something like "an ECC error occurred on the L1 cache during pre-instruction fetch" and really detailed CPU-specific stuff like that.

I decoded your MCE using the document at

http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_and_tech_docs/26094.PDF.

It works out to be a "valid uncorrected error where the processor context was corrupt", specifically where the model-specific error code = 0x0007 and the MCA error code = 0x0F0F. However, the document doesn't describe how to decode those last two chunks of information. If it's the same as the Pentium 4, then the MCA error decodes into a "completely generic data bus error".

Are you overclocking? If so, that's the first thing you should stop!

I think that's all the advice I have...

 

[Freestone]

Using Taed's excellent analysis, and the following Microsoft KB article, one can say it could be bad memory, but the KB also points out other possiblities:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=329284&sd=RMVP

 

[gorzonking]

Since i last wrote about the stop error message, i thought i would change the graphics card in my computer to an old one, to see if my new card was faulty, when i did this i did'nt get the error message anymore and i could now play my games for longer without anything happenning but I now have another problem where the monitor flicks onto standby mode but i can still hear the game coming through the speakers.
Why would this be?
Is this something more than just a graphics card problem?

 

[mainegeek]

It may also be from cheap "out of spec" memory.

 

[gorzonking]

Thanx mainegeek,
your probally right when you say it's out of spec memory,iv'e already had a past problem with the stuff and when i was booting up the system for the first time, trying desperately to install windows xp, i had near enough got a different blue screen of death message every time.
obviously i did get it going in the end with another stick of RAM but this too is not the best memory money will buy, it's just what i had at the time.
When payday comes i will invet in some decent memory that my motherboard specifies.

 

[xgoodvibesx]

sys spec:
amd athlon 6400+
asus k8ne deluxe (nforce3)
geforce fx 5800
768 mb ram (one 512 one 256)
maxtor 100gb hd
win xp sp 2

i'm having exactly the same problem. in my case it has been occuring for some time, specifically when i ran norton speed disk. being the idiot i am i tried running it yesterday and it worked fine, but since then have been getting this message whenever i performed a specific action in the game star wars galaxies. this is duplicable- i've done it at least five times (although first time this evening, it worked- after that it broke every time. wierd).

so, the question would be have you run speed disk recently? i also ran win doctor and disk doctor, just to avoid discounting them. i have a sneaking suspicion i installed the latest windows updates as well.

you can try this :

http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=376942&goto=nextnewest

but it didn't work for me :/

actions taken so far:

used the basic windows defrag program to shuffle everything back across the hd.

ran disk doctor a couple of times.

lowered the transfer mode on my hd from ultra100 to ultra66, and diasbled write caching. your system may be different, but you can do this by going into device manager and selecting the ata/ati controllers and somewhere in there will be the settings. what this in effect does is force your hard disk to slow down. my burst speed was averaging 84mb/s, which is almost suicidally high. by dropping it to 66 the burst speed has dropped to 55mb/s, which should be much more stable, without a noticable drop in performance. although it hasn't solved the problem, as we both have maxtor hd's, you should probably check to see how fast it's going, just as a general health check.

i'll try playing half life 2 tommorrow and see if i get blue screened. out of interest, is it happening at a specific point in hl2? and if so, what level and where?

 

[xgoodvibesx]

ok i seem to have stopped it happening for now, i did the following:

another defrag using the windows defrag tool

a diskdoctor scan that included scanning the free memory (this is what stopped it last time)

updated the amd driver to 1.1.0.18- this was a bit hairy, you have to uninstall the existing processor driver with the program, restart, and reinstall the driver using the program- don't let the windows hardware installer try to do it, it won't work.

i honestly don't know which one fixed it, i just hope it was the amd driver and it's fixed for good.