I recently built my desktop computer in late January. Everything went well except once every 6 or 7 days I would get the dreaded blue screen of death. I simply rebooted and the computer and it ran just fine for several more days. When I say run fine I mean up without reboot days on end editing photos, playing games surfing the net and anything I wanted.
Most people would ignore this or say Windows sucks Bill Gates should burn in hell and live with substandard computing. Not me, I routinely keep my computer up without reboot several months on end and when I can’t do that there is something wrong. Windows is so rock solid stable I knew for an absolute fact I had hardware issues. Windows does not crash period. Ram, motherboard, hard drive, power supply, drivers or poorly written software do. In fact Windows is the strongest link in the chain.
With a computer giving errors so seldom how did I solve the problem? First I needed a power supply for my second computer. So I bought a 500 watt Antec. I put the new power supply in the new computer and moved the existing power supply to my second computer. I know power supplies can cause this trouble but I doubt that was it. No matter I needed it anyways. Four days after the power supply was installed oh no another blue screen.
So what did I do? Did I bash windows like what most would do? No way because Windows does not crash. Ram can cause this trouble so I ran memtest 86 on the computer and sure enough within 30 seconds it found errors. I have 2 1 gig sticks so which one was bad. I took out one stick and the stick left in past with flying colors. I swapped ram sticks and that one failed. I then put it in my second computer and ran the test again and it failed again. No doubt that was my problem, what a relief.
The ram has a lifetime warranty and I still have the receipt so I can get it exchanged no problem. Also this is one of the reasons why I always install 2 sticks of ram in my computer. If one stick goes bad I can still keep on going. Sure I have 1 gig instead of 2 gigs but it will still serve my needs while I get the bad ram exchanged.
