Friday, February 17, 2006

Update to Flaky Power Supply (Round II)

In my previous post, I explained my solution to my system crashing (blue screening) all the time was to swap out power supplies (it was a somewhat odd case, in that the system ran fine with a different CPU, but it wasn't the CPU).

Well, I started experiencing BSODs again. Now bear in mind the system is entirely Prime95 and MemTest86 error-free, at least until it blue screens. One of the crashes occurred when I loaded up and tried Rollercoaster Tycoon* on the system, and the blue screen referenced the sound driver. So I tried disabling the onboard sound. It's now been running for 48 hours continuous with no BSODs.

I guess maybe it was the onboard sound driver or hardware. I'm going to see if Realtek has an updated driver in a few days (most likely the current one just got corrupted in a power failure-induced crash, but I like new drivers - they usually work better). If the crashes return with the onboard sound enabled, I'll try a discrete sound card and see if that works any better. I have rebooted once or twice just to make sure it wouldn't start doing it again after a reboot.

I'm still pretty suspicious that the root cause might be something I haven't identified yet. The crashes seem to come and go, and are affected by the strangest things (swapping CPUs made them go away, but the CPU that I was crashing with worked fine in another computer). So we shall see what happens.

* - (Rationale: "Since I can't do any real work...")

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