All the parts I currently have right now are my brother's old parts. At the time of purchase (3 years ago?) they were about $700 total. Months after having no problems, it started randomly shutting off. For about a year, he brought it into multiple diagnostics centers, friends, etc. but nothing good came of it. We were already losing money just from its presence. So after the year ended, he gave up on it. It then sat inside our garage, waiting for the next day it would be used.
Cut back to the present, I gave it to my cousin in hopes he could fix it. He thought to himself, well, if I can fix this PC, I should be up to building my own! He sent the old graphics card back to ATI for a new one (lifetime warranty is pretty cool), and it worked again. No more monitor shutters, no more random restarts, life was good. He even played games on it with no problems. We also had a small monitor shuttering problem due to ATI's most recent graphics driver, but he replaced it with an older one. It worked.
Now cut back to him giving it back to me. He's had it maybe 2-3 months playing games on it with no real problems. He did say Firefox and Spybot would cause the PC to restart sometimes, and said he ran Memtest86 to check the RAM. It came back with a ton of errors. He did this individually with both sticks yet still a ton of errors found. Alas, I wanted it back anyways, thinking I would use it solely as a gaming platform.
I hook it up (took an hour, because my cords from my old PC are all tied up neatly, and I didn't want to cut the ties). The PC ran perfectly. Not a single error. Not a single restart. I transferred about 70 GBs of my old comp's data to it, and I was happy. 2 months it ran perfectly in my possession, until one day...
*poweroff sound... poweron sound*
Me: "Wait what?"
All I did was try to open Steam, a program I'm sure you guys are familiar with. Note before this, I was playing a lot of Half-Life 2, so thsi came as strange to me. I tried it again after it finished, and it just restarted again. I knew something was wrong here. I logged onto AIM, then opened iTunes for some music. BAM, the computer restarts again. At this point I was getting pissed. The same errors my brother experienced I am getting, and I have no way to fix it. I asked around, but to no avail. I recall my cousin telling me it was a RAM problem, so I tried to get my RAM replaced under lifetime warranty. However, the RAM guy insist that since both sticks were "working fine" until that day, I am not eligible for it until I run through all his stupid tests that he won't even name for me. I ran a few google searches, and it suggested setting the computer to not automatically restart when it encouters an error. The name of it is "bad_pool_caller". Short summary is...
I get a "bad_pool_caller" error, which randomly occurs on my PC. I could be idle, on the Internet, playing a game, whatever. Certain programs will shut it down when opened. Steam and iTunes are examples. I'd appreciate all the help I could get here.
Specs:
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2 ghz)
Motherboard: ASUS A8V Deluxe
Card: ATI Radeon 9800 PRO (AGP 4-8x)
Corsair VS512MB400 x2 (for a total of 1GB)
Note: I'm bad with computer terminology, so it might be slightly off here. I'm acquainted with things such as the Control Panel and all of that, so don't make me feel too dumb here. Thanks.
Edited by X6488, 05 December 2007 - 06:33 PM.