I'm gonna lay it all out here since these things seem interrelated somehow -- I just haven't yet connected all the dots.
Oh -- the computer I'm talking about is a Dell Optiplex GX280 running Windows XP SP3, has 2 gigs ram, about 15 gigs free on the HDD, has an ATI Radeon X1650 512MB video card, some sort of Firewire card (with no FW devices hooked to it), and maybe some other stuff I am not remembering right now. I can post more details later if you want -- like an AIDA report or whatever.
The problems:
- The computer will not wake up properly from sleep/stand by (I am not hibernating it). Well, it will wake up, but after I type in my password, it will hard crash anywhere from 5 to 30 seconds later. By hard crash I mean no keyboard access, no mouse movement, no ctrl-alt-del, can't activate AntiFreeze, can't hit the power button. The only thing that will recover the computer is to remove and reapply power.
- The same hard crash happens when the computer is idle for any length of time. Sometimes it will sit 8 hours or more without crashing, but more often it hard crashes (as above) a little while after going idle.
- Sometimes I will get a BSOD without any warning whatsoever. Relevant information on these screens is that they are caused by a PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA error in the file WIN32K.sys
This all started happening about a month after I installed SP3.
Things I have done:
- run sfc /scannow
- renamed win32k.sys to let the system rebuild one for me
- removed the ATI video drivers and installed the Omega drivers which are gaming drivers guilt on older versions of the official ATI drivers
- pared down my system tray & killed processes
- ran complete scans with several antivirus & anti malware programs (they found nothing)
- defragged C:
- ran nearly every test located on a relatively standard build of the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows
- ran chkdsk (several times)
- set the HDD to never go to sleep (in the power options)
Anyone have something else to suggest? I'd really like to put this behind me.