carpe_caminus
08-07-2008, 12:42 AM
Ok, so I'm having a ton of issues with my computer. It originally started with EQ1 but has begun happening in EQ2. In EQ1 it was only BSOD's so I decided to post here because EQ2 occasionally just crashes giving error messages that may have some significance.In EQ1 I'll randomly BSOD after a while of playing. Even if I'm just afk (happened more than once that way). In EQ2 it appears to be the same story. There's no clear trigger that sets it off. The first BSOD in EQ2, I was in a deep Sebilis group (prior to the group I had spent several hours Tinkering in a tradeskill instance and then attended a raid for Venril Sathir all without a reboot). I had noticed my sound was getting kind of echoey, so I checked my sound settings and noticed that it was still set to "Miles Fast Audio" I can't remember if that's the exact wording, but I believe that's the onboard sound support for my MOBO. I had previously installed EQ2 before getting my newest soundcard. I now use a <b>Creative Sound Blaster X-fi Xtreme Audio</b> sound card. Since I noticed options for EAX settings I set it to one. The echos went away... only to return seconds later. I then tried the next EAX setting. Same deal. The echo went away but only for a few seconds. I tried this with each setting. We were in the caves near the Spore King's spawn and we were about to wipe and with most of the group dead the scout evac'd the survivors. While in the Lobby (and during a discussion telling the scout not to evac when there's an active loot roll) I got a BSOD. (unfortunately I didn't write down the info on that BSOD) I rebooted, and got reinvited.Then we were heading back down to where we were, and in the area where you come out of the underwater tunnels between the room of sathirian mobs on your right and the Chokidai and their handlers on your left along some jail cells. During the first fight after emerging from the water my sound started... flipping out. Lots of really loud staticy noise and some visual errors on screen as well. The best I can describe it is, the lower half of my screen was flickering black in a series of odd shapes... mostly triangular to my recollection. I rebooted before it fully crashed. After that I ran a chkdsk on C: to find no errors, and completely defragmented the drive hoping that would do some good. Apparently it made no difference.Yesterday, I was in a shard of Fear group, and while in the zone I had one BSOD and one Fatal error. Again I was too hasty to reboot and get back in the game and failed to write down the information on the BSOD. I did however get a screenshot of the Fatal Error. One interesting thing is that I have no crashlogs in my EQ2 directory. I also have no mention of any kind of system or application failure in the Event Viewer for when these crashes happened.This is the Fatal Error message I got:<img src="http://mysecurityadvice.googlepages.com/error.bmp" border="0" alt="" />I really don't understand the message because there's no such file on drive E:... or even such a directory. I have 4 HDD's, though E: and F: are used purely for mass storage and have no files related to any games or other software.I also have the information from a BSOD that I had in EQ1:<b>*** STOP: 0x0000000A (0x00000000, 0x000000FF, 0x00000000, 0x806E2EA0)</b>I have run a memtest, two full passes (about a 2hr runtime) and it showed no errors.I am starting to suspect that one of my HDD's is just starting to near the ned of its life, but I'm not yet sure.Here's some system specs:CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6400+ 3.21GHzRAM: 3.50GB (it's actually 2 2GB sticks of RAM running in Dual channel.)Vid: NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT (latest drivers from the Nvidia website, I even double checked)Sound: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio (also latest drivers kept updated with Creative's autodownloader and double checked on the creative website)OS: Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 (all updates except SP3)DirectX is also the latest version downloaded and installed from the Microsoft website.I use a Western Digital Raptor WD360GD, 36GB SATA HDD for my C: drive. I only have windows, drivers and other critical software components on this drive.For my D: drive, I have a Maxtor 6B300S0, 300GB SATA HDD. This is where I install my games and other programs including EQ1 and EQ2. (Even though it's my newest drive, if I were to suspect one of my HDD's of being on the verge of failure it would be this one)The crashes on EQ1 happened weeks before they started happening in EQ2. I had originally thought EQ1 was causing the crashes now I'm not sure.I also have all of my minidump .dmp files saved seperately but I have no idea how to actually make use of those files.EDIT: I've also done a full range of malware and virus scans all which come back clean.