Is my WindowsXP Pro crashing atleast 6 times a day normal?

[Compddd]

Cause it crashes that many times atleast a day, sometimes when Im playing Battlefield 1942, all of a sudden, crash. Sometimes when im just surfing the internet, boom crash. When I alt tab out of Asheron's Call, boom instant crash. Is this normal??? What are some common problems that cause crashes?? What can I do to fix this? My system is 2.26GHz P4, Iwill P4R533-N Mobo, 512MB Mushkin 1066 RAMBUS, Radeon 9700 Pro with Latest Drivers, Creative Audigy Gamer with latest drivers, Western Digital 120 GB 8MB HD, and a 3 year old 32X standard CDROM Drive.

 

[Yomicron]

what kind of crashes are they? BSODs? sudden reboots?

a crash could be caused by any number of things.

Your system may be overheating, make sure you have adequate airflow in your case.

The RAM could be bad, try lowering the bus freq to see if that helps.

 

[LED]

Is my WindowsXP Pro crashing atleast 6 times a day normal?

No mine can runs 6days beore I decide to reboot.

I would go to CMOS and use the default timingg's and check for 1 BIOS upsate and you stated that the new Catalysts drvers are in so if that doesn't work it's prolly some HW config part.

 

[holdencommodore]

Ofcourse it's normal....it's a Microsoft product j/k

Seriously though, there must be something wrong if it's crashing that often. How long is it since a clean install has been done? Any programs installed recently? Run Scandisk and see if there are any corrupted files.... ofcourse there are many, many things which could cause system stability.


Cheers

 

[Calin]

My computer reboots in Windows XP after some 12 hours of functioning. It is a problem, but it doesn't affects me much.
It could be also the power source, but you can't know a priori that (I mean before changing it)
If "Alt-Tab" out of a game brings a crash, most probably are video card driver related problems. Did you installed Intel chipset info? Maybe if you install it, then it will work better (Intel chipset info or whatever are called - not the Application accelerator)

Calin

 

[sharkeeper]

No it's far from normal. That many anomalies over a month period would be excessive to me!

Cheers!

 

[crazychicken]

yea, i agree with it being video card related.

so check those drivers, and also install the intel chipset drivers

 

[ScrewFace]

I hear ya. Sometimes Windows XP locks up 10 seconds after boot-up and sometimes it'll run for days and then, all of a sudden, it'll reboot. Wierd. Never had that problem with Windows 9x/ME.

 

[xMikey]

Originally posted by: Calin
If "Alt-Tab" out of a game brings a crash, most probably are video card driver related problems. Did you installed Intel chipset info? Maybe if you install it, then it will work better (Intel chipset info or whatever are called - not the Application accelerator)

Calin

ALT + Tab out of games is never particularly good...

Never had XP Pro crash yet and been running it for 5 months. The machine has been up for 10 days at the mo.


Mikey out!!

 

[thorin]

Let me guess you're getting "IRQ not less then or equal to Zero" (er whatever) errors? Have you run memtest on your system?

Thorin

 

[Spleenus]

One solution to sudden reboot's is because by default in Windows XP the system will reboot if it encounters an error rather than show BSOD. You can disable this somewhere, but I can't remember as I'm on a 98 machine atm.


I believe it's in system settings.

Also I have hardly any crashes on Win XP. so 6/day shouldn't be happening.

 

[ericboo]

My XP Pro install is an upgrade from W2K and my computer is up for weeks at a time with no problems and has had one BSOD in the past 6 months or more. It is not normal and you may have a driver-related problem. Worth investigating.

There is a way to stop the memory dump/reboot, but you still want to resolve it. There is something on Microsoft's site about ways of logging errors, but you should write down the Stop Error you get if you get the BSOD and look it up on their site.

 

[dullard]

If you get a consistant crash when you do things like you say, then they are definately not hardware related (such as bad power supply, memory, or heat). Hardware crashes would be random, or at the boot. Somewhere you have a software/driver issue.

 

[Macro2]

Too bad they don't write those games for Linux.

 

[Compddd]

I get alot of IRQ Less or not equal errors. and all the crashes are random except when I alt tab out of Asheron's Call, that error is caused by an ati driver file. When I first built the system I couldn't even install WindowsXP or anything because the ram was bad. I dont know if I should get rid of this ram and try some new ram. Also all the crashes are BSOD's, cause I turned off auto reboot in WinXP so I could see the errors. I also have the 2nd to latest BIOS from Iwill, I dont have the latest because they fubared one release and I tried the newest bios that replaced the fubar one and its messed up too.

 

[thorin]

1) Run memtest86 on it. (This can narrow it down for us).
2) What Temps are you running at?
3) Are you running a fresh XP install or did you upgrade another MS OS?

Thorin

 

[Compddd]

What will memtest show us??

I dont overclock, also use an all copper heatsink with heatpipes, no load 27C, full load 36C

Fresh Install of XP Pro, didn't upgrade

 

[Lonyo]

IIRC, memtest checks your RAM is totally OK (ie: no problems with it that could mess up the system). It'll help ascertain if the RAM could be causing crashing.

 

[thorin]

Originally posted by: Lonyo
IIRC, memtest checks your RAM is totally OK (ie: no problems with it that could mess up the system). It'll help ascertain if the RAM could be causing crashing.

It can also point to the mobo or CPU but that's still a narrowed scope, and depending on the other answers we get may point to one particular item.

Thorin

 

[Compddd]

ok I ran memtest, no errors

 

[gf4200isdabest]

explorer.exe crashes all the time but i never get crashes that actually need a reboot....

 

[teerex20]

Well you could also write down error code and type it in here to get a better idea of what's wrong.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;en-us;msall

 

[CraigRT]

It's cause XP is a pile of crap.. one of the worst OS's ever.. sounds like a slight instability to me. anything overclocked? try dumbing down some of the RAM timings or something in the BIOS. try giving the CPU and/or V/IO a bit more juice. that's the first thing I would try if I really had no idea what was causing it.

 

[cliftonite]

Originally posted by: Yield
It's cause XP is a pile of crap.. one of the worst OS's ever.. sounds like a slight instability to me. anything overclocked? try dumbing down some of the RAM timings or something in the BIOS. try giving the CPU and/or V/IO a bit more juice. that's the first thing I would try if I really had no idea what was causing it.

I dunno XP is the most stable Microsoft operating system that I have ever used.

System Up Time: 20 Days, 5 Hours, 58 Minutes, 43 Seconds

 

[Compddd]

Nothing is overclocked, everything is set to default.