Hi,
I hope somebody can help us out. I've been trying to get help from HP, but I see now that doing it through email is an absolutely horrible way (I initially was just asking a simple question and it became much more complicated!) and I'm not sure I feel like dealing with their online chat help right now.
Anyhow, here's the deal:
We have a Compaq Presario S4220NX Athlon 2600+ 2.13 GHz 1MB RAM and ATI Radeon 9200 graphics card. We do not use the original setup that came with the computer (with Windows Home Edition), but a packaged Windows XP Professional bundles with I don't know what else. HP is so far recommending that we return to the original setup (we'd have to buy the software to do so), but I'm not convinced that will solve our problems. (Although it would provide us with PC Doctor which could do a diagnostic test, but that would require wiping out everything we have set up, including our partitions, just to run a diagnostic test. Surely there has to be a simpler way!)
What are our problems? For sometime, the computer has been crashing and rebooting while playing games, mainly Diablo II, The Sims, SimCity4 and The Sims 2. The Sims and SimCity4 got to a point of crashing within the first 5 minutes or so, so we gave up. I got The Sims 2 a little over a year ago and I don't think it originally crashed, but not sure. Now it's erratic–I can go a week without it crashing, or I can try to play it one day and it'll crash after 5 minutes. After each crash and reboot, Windows tells us the computer has recovered from a serious error–supposedly a hardware problem.
I chatted with HP help last week and the guy suggested we increase our virtual memory. I did that, tried playing The Sims and SimCity and they didn't crash. However, dh's Diablo II crashed (and rebooted) every time he hit a battle scene. He checked out some help stuff HP had sent us and did a little searching online and decided to check out what was going on inside the computer. A wonky fan in the power supply apparently wasn't pushing any air whatsoever, so he replaced the power supply, tried Diablo II and it worked–no crash. It was the first time in many months that it had not crashed. Next day, it crashed. And The Sims and SimCity have since crashed. Obviously our problem isn't fixed, although why Diablo, The Sims and SimCity worked for the first time in months, we can't understand.
To add to this, for sometime there has been an occasional… the best way I can call it is a robotic grinding sound, or… not grinding. I don't know. Just this electronic/robotic sounding noise that comes out of the computer, lasts a few seconds and it's gone. It seems to happen more on start up than any other time. I've not been able to pinpoint exactly where it comes from, although I think it is in the area of all the drives. Maybe it's nothing, but we don't know.
Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated. I have in my mind that The Sims actually started crashing before we switched to XP Professional, and I'm quite sure that that is correct as it was just before or just after XP SP2 came out that we started having problems. We didn't get the XP Professional until sometime after that. Please, please help!
TIA,
D.
Logfile of HijackThis v1.99.1
Scan saved at 4:37:36 PM, on 05/05/2006
Platform: Windows XP SP2 (WinNT 5.01.2600)
MSIE: Internet Explorer v6.00 SP2 (6.00.2900.2180)
I'm not good with hardware errors and someone might step in and help with the noise sounds it's making.
But we might can find some logged errors in event manager……..Or in Device manager……as it may give reasons for the crashes….
In addition to Juliets excellent advice you should check your memory. Problems of the type you are having could very well be memory related. Download memtest which is a program for testing your RAM modules. Make sure you download the Pre-Compiled Memtest86 v3.2 installable from Windows and DOS version (<< link starts download).
Put a blank floppy in your floppy drive. Open "My Computer" then right click the floppy drive icon and choose "Format". In the dialog box that opens DO NOT choose "Quick Format". Click ok to the dialog and allow the format to finish. If you don't format the disk first chances are much greater that the program will fail to run properly.
Leave the floppy disk in the drive, go to the folder where you unzipped memtest to (you must have unzipped memtest, it will not work from a zip directory) and double click install.bat. For the target drive enter the letter 'a' and press enter. The programs will be copied to the floppy disk (the dos window will close). Once that is done you WILL NOT be able to look at the contents of the disk (windows will give you a "disk is not formatted" message), that is normal.
Leave the floppy disk in the drive and reboot the computer. If you get any messages about booting from the floppy make sure it happens. If you get a message about not being able to read from the floppy or memtest does not run, toss out that floppy disc, format and reinstall memtest on a different one.
Let memtest run all eight of its tests, at least two passes (all 8 tests twice) unless you get errors the first time. Plan on this taking close to an hour, time varies with the amount of memory to test and your machines cpu, etc. Run as many passes as you have time for, the more the better. Due to the way that data is stored in RAM it often takes several passes for a tool to write to every "nook and cranny" in a module. Post back with the results of the test (you will have to write them down, memtest doesn't contain any printing or file saving options).
In addition, after viewing your current event logs I suggest saving them to a file and then clearing them. After the problem reoccurs check the event logs for new entries.
Thank you both for helping me out with this.
I can't find a log in Device Manager but everything listed is working fine.
In Event Viewer, I was able to find the two times it crashed yesterday in the System folder. Both say this:
Details
Product: Windows Operating System
Event ID: 1003
Source: System Error
Version: 5.2
Symbolic Name: ER_KRNLCRASH_LOG
Message: Error code %1, parameter1 %2, parameter2 %3, parameter3 %4, parameter4 %5.
Explanation
A blue screen (Stop error) was reported. The message contains details about the error. A matching event with Event ID 1001 might also appear in the event log. This matching event displays information about the specific error that occurred.
User Action
No user action is required.
Events with ID 1001 have Save Dump in the Source column. Opening the event, part of the description is this:
The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x1000000a (0xfffe8080, 0x00000002, 0x00000001, 0x806ee2dc).
There was one of these events just 2 minutes before the first crash. I don't understand why it says that it had rebooted from a bugcheck when the computer hadn't been rebooted yet. The other 1001 was more than an hour before the second crash. Looking through the other crashes and 1001's, there is a 1001 at some point before each of the crashes. Why would it have a message about rebooting before it has even crashed?
I used the Windows Memory Diagnostic last night–will that be as good as memtest? It all checked out fine, though I did only do one pass. I also tried Tuff TEST Lite and there weren't any problems that showed up. I also did some registry check thing (can't remember what–you had to pay to have the registry keys cleaned up or something) and there were supposedly quite a few errors there. Could that cause the crashes?
Thanks again,
D.
One thing you can do is run a sfc /scannow and check for corrupt system files…..
Here is a Microsoft link with suggestions and instructions……scroll to Use the System File Checker (Sfc.exe) tool System File Checker
you maybe prompted for your Windows CD if errors are found….
Trying to research this I did fine where some had this problem after they installed iPod, and if you have to I would immediately suspect the iPod software.
Same goes for anti-virus software, software firewall,….something has caused an incompatible driver.
The error codes indicate the problem is likely with either hardware or a driver on your system.
Quick update:
After doing a bit of research on the codes online and talking to my dh (who had his game crash this morning), he decided to not wait until tonight to do the memtest and simply pulled the old RAM (our 1MB is half original, half added on after we started having problems). He then tried out his Diablo II. No crash. I guess we'll see as the week goes on and the other programs are used.
Thanks again for your help. I'm glad I learned about the error log!
Are you still noticing that "weird Not Grinding" sound that you suspected might be Hard Drive related?
This may be a separate but important problem to attend to.
You might be able to pinpoint it better with the case open.
Hard Drives do have to go through more Read/Write cycles at boot-up than at most other times, and you mention that it is quite noticeable when you start your machine.
Hard Drives sometimes give warning when they are about to fail, and sometimes don't.
I'd sure be thinking about getting a second Hard Drive, even if I just installed it to "backup" my important Data. Then if the Master hard drive fails, you haven't lost important data.
Yes, that noise reappeared today after several days of quiet. It made it when the computer came out of sleep mode (or whatever we have it set on) then a few minutes later, quite loud, scared me half to death and is now making a sort of constant hum. It is from the hard drive.
I'm in the process of backing up my stuff… And going out on the weekend to get another drive.
Is there some free online program that can check the drive? Or is it possibly something that can't be checked that way?
I think you've already made the diagnosis.
Your operating system's Disk Scan will examine the "surface" of the drive to locate "bad sectors". But every hard drive (even brand new ones) have bad sectors. The Disk Scan simply identifies the areas that can't be written to, and marks the location so that your machine won't try to use it. It essentially will "skip" past any identified bad sector as if it isn't even there. "Bad sectors" don't cause noise.
However, you are writing about a "noise" that alarms you. That would have to do with the mechanical components of the hard drive that make the disk spin at 5400 or 7200 rpm's, or the "arm" that moves the laser read/write head. If you have an alarming noise… something is wearing out.
You're doing the right thing to be getting your data backed up and considering a new hard drive.
Best Regards
Thanks for the link about diagnosing. We have not yet gotten another hard drive, although we are backing up stuff. The noise comes and goes–so frustrating.
As far as I can tell, there are only two fans in our computer–the power supply (which has alread been replaced because we knew it was faulty) and the other one turns just fine. I can get my ear right up to the hard drive and hear this continual sort of hum it makes. The louder noise that appears now and then is just like an amplified version of it. And I did manage to have my ear next to the open computer one day when it made the sound–it is coming from the hard drive.
However, we seem to have another issue. Since everything was working just fine with only the newer RAM in the machine, dh decided to experiment and to see what would happen if only the older RAM was in. Everything seemed fine until the kids started playing Sims 2. Although for one of the times, it didn't crash, it has crashed two times in the past two days at about 50 minutes into game play. But it's not giving the same Windows error message, about it being hardward. It's telling us it's a device driver problem. All the rest of the situation is the same, including parameter codes. We'll be out this afternoon, so I'm going to run memtest on it, but I don't get why it would work fine for days then start causing problems.
Gotta love computers, eh?
However, we seem to have another issue. Since everything was working just fine with only the newer RAM in the machine, dh decided to experiment and to see what would happen if only the older RAM was in. Everything seemed fine until the kids started playing Sims 2. Although for one of the times, it didn't crash, it has crashed two times in the past two days at about 50 minutes into game play. But it's not giving the same Windows error message, about it being hardward. It's telling us it's a device driver problem. All the rest of the situation is the same, including parameter codes. We'll be out this afternoon, so I'm going to run memtest on it, but I don't get why it would work fine for days then start causing problems.
Gotta love computers, eh?
That is normal behavior for faulty memory. What is happening is that the area where the driver code is stored in memory becomes corrupted, the operating system cannot use the driver and you get the error. At other times you get other errors. It depends on what is stored in the faulty block of memory.
I'm guessing that the bad memory stick fails under stress. Memtest will probably find the bad section(s) (it displays them in red) as long as you let it run all the tests multiple times.
I found out that it wasn't our old RAM that dh had in the computer this most recent stretch, but the newer RAM. So the computer is crashing regardless of which RAM is in place. I ran memtest with both RAMs in place–let it do 13 runs and it didn't find any errors.
Is it possible that there is something wrong with the RAM slots or the cpu itself? If all else fails, we'll be going on a short trip in about a month and can leave our computer with FutureShop (where we bought it from and have extended warranty–hopefully us adding RAM or changing power supply, things like that, won't affect it!) during that time for them to do a full diagnostic on it. It's still crashing and rebooting and giving us the same error message in Event Viewer, although the Windows message we get varies between it being hardware or a device driver–this is something totally new as for, what, a year? it had only been telling us it was a hardware problem.
As a general rule if you crack open the case then the warranty is void. You might be ok if you put the original memory and power supply back in and don't mention anything about what you have done.
If you have an extended warranty then the first step after you determine the problem is hardware related should be to bring it in for warranty repair.
Why don't you make that your next step and we'll pick up here if they don't / won't take care of it.
Thanks for the feedback, rand1038.
My dh is prepared to just continue be annoyed by the crashing instead of taking it in. It's ONLY during (certain) gaming, and every diagnostic we've been able to get our hands on has not shown any problems. I think the most frustrating part of all of this has been the inconsistencies, like things working okay for a day after we installed the new power supply, then it went back to crashing; things worked fine with just the newer RAM, then it went back to crashing… I don't get it.
Thank you everyone for your help, even if we haven't managed to fully resolve the issue. We're looking at having a new computer possibly later in the year, largely so we can have two computers in the home, so we can only hope that our preferred games will be fine on them. (If not, then we know incompatibility/drivers/etc. is the problem! )
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Your operating system's Disk Scan will examine the "surface" of the drive to locate "bad sectors". But every hard drive (even brand new ones) have bad sectors. The Disk Scan simply identifies the areas that can't be written to, and marks the location so that your machine won't try to use it. It essentially will "skip" past any identified bad sector as if it isn't even there. "Bad sectors" don't cause noise.
However, you are writing about a "noise" that alarms you. That would have to do with the mechanical components of the hard drive that make the disk spin at 5400 or 7200 rpm's, or the "arm" that moves the laser read/write head. If you have an alarming noise… something is wearing out.
You're doing the right thing to be getting your data backed up and considering a new hard drive. 
Best Regards