About 10-15 minutes into graphics intensive games, my machine is crashing and crashing hard: No blue screen of death, just the blackness of heavy blow to the head.

Windows Event Viewer gives me an error #1 for Disk 1. That error message indicates a problem with the disk controller or the cable. But here’s the fun part. I disabled Disk 1 via Windows disk manager (i.e., I did it through software, not by changing the hardware), and not only does the system still crash, it gives me the exact same error for the new Disk 1. So, I’m thinking it’s not really a disk problem.

I ran Mem86 overnight and it reported no RAM problems..

There are oceans of unused disk space, so that’s not the problem. And I have 2 gigs of RAM, so I’m not running out of space.

I ran AVG virus checker and CounterSpy spyware checker. No problems.

The temperature monitors don’t indicate overheating. Of course, I don’t see the monitors when I have a full-screen, graphics-intensive game going.

My guess is that the culprit is the graphics card. I have an ATI Radeon 9800xt. I’ve set AGP to off instead of its usual 8x, but it made no difference.

What’s your guess?

[Unless Mac hardware never fails, please do not tell me to get a Mac. Thank you.] [Tags: bugs]

Categories: Uncategorized dw