Asus V1JP Totally wrecked! Help ! A lot of BSOD!

Ok. 3 weeks ago i've bought brand new Asus V1JP.
I asked my reseller to upgrade to 2 gig RAM with additional 1GIG KINGSTON Memory.

Everything was great for the first week .I am workng mainly with Photoshop with large files around 100-400 mb . Everything was smooth and performance was great..after a week I had my first BSOD and a few minor problems .so I went back to the exchange memory ..They gave me another stick of 1GIG Kingston but system was still unstable so I have returned it back again staying only with orignal stick of RAM.

The problem is that now the performance is terrible..I am getting a lot of BSOD's !!! and performance is worse than on my old CENTRINO 1.5Ghz.

BSODS I usually get are :
STOP: 0x000000F4
STOP: 0x0000007A

The weird thing is that when I start PHOTOSHOP everything is damn slow.
The hard drvie is spinning all the time..Even when I press OPEN FILE option I have to wait a few good seconds to do anything ..I am suspecting that there is something wrong with the HARD DRIVE.

I have already used: HDTUNE and SEATOOLS to check HDD ..It shows no errors ..but I have noticed something weird in HDTUNE ..when I was checking HDD with errors the scanning speed after a few minutes was 8.9 MB/S which is very slow..

PLEASE HELP ..I dunno what to do with that..

 

well, you can check your memory with memtest86. search it on google to get it. burn the iso to cd and make sure that your computer can boot to cd. memtest should run by itself when you start up your computer with the cd in the drive.

also, you should check to see if your hd is in udma or pio mode. it should be on udma. pio will greatly decrease performance.

 

How can exactly check if it is UDMA or PIO ?

 

I'm pretty sure its faulty RAM, as mentioned, do a memtest and see if it reports anything.


That or a virus, perhaps a do a system restore?

 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/817472

"If you use Device Manager to view the properties of the IDE channel towhich the drive is connected, the Advanced Settings tab may show that the current transfer mode for the drive is PIO Mode."

 

- Did you try to reinstall your Windows from the restore CDs? Maybe something you installed is causing it, particularly things which install system services.
- Did you try taking out the DIMM that comes with the unit and only using the Kingston module to see if the module that comes with the laptop was defective?
- In your Event Viewer, do you have any ftdisk errors or other types of disk errors under System?

Also, you said you do Photoshop. Did you monitor the temperature of the CPU while the system was running? Maybe the temperature was too high and something on the board didn't like it...

 

Ok .So far:
- I have runned overnight test with memtest86 - NO ERRORS
- HDD test with HDTUNE and SEATOOLS - NO ERRORS
- HDD works in UDMA mode
- AVAST antivirus test CLEAN

Just great .a brand new notebook and it works like some ancient CENTRINO
Right now I am abroad and I cant reinstall as I have no CD with me ..but I really doubt if it will help.
I still think there is some think wrong with HDD - during work in photoshop
it is spinning all the time even when I do basic operations.
Any oder ideas how can I test HDD ?

 

I've been experiencing some ocassional BSOD as well, and after reading some messages in this forum, I found the cause to be a slighty faulty hard drive.
When you get the BSOD, does the HD light stays permanently lit? If so, it's because the drive gets "locked". If the BSOD just stays there saying "writing dump to disk" but never finishes, try tapping the right bottom of the laptop where the disk is, and the PC should reboot. I even saved myself from BSOD once by tapping on the disk when everything started to freeze.

I think the warranty should cover the defective HD, but since the fault is not reproducible at will, I don't want my notebook to go and back to a service centre a few times since I need it for my work and in my case the fault is not that frequent. Eventually I will replace the HD with a new one.

 

asarco : but did you notice slower performance due to faulty hdd ? ..I dont know why but when I start using Illustrator, Photoshop or anything else ..the performance is terrible .. HDD is working like crazy

 

You can recover OS anyway if you didn't remove your recovery partition. F9 during boot, will overwrite everything on the OS partition if you select smth like "recover to first partition only".

I suggest recovery, and if it works nicely after that, paying attention to tweaks, disabled services etc. Don't do tweaks unless you are sure about their effect. If you pay attention to every step, even if you do make the change that made it work poorly, you might be able to revert it.

 

If the only time you face a problem is during photoshop, then you should try changing the scratchfile location. Try putting it on an external USB HDD, and see if it persists. It does seem to be a RAM problem, though.

 

Not at all. Performance is always superb, but then again, my BSOD are occassional only.

 

Did both of you try out the Memtest X86 ?
If you run the test, the results might not always be true, burn the Memtest bootable disk and try the test.Let it at least get to 500% (5 times test for the whole memory).
As a desperate measure, try disabling the devices in turn to see who is guilty.Start with the lan and modem drivers.
Another good stress test is Stress Prime Orthos 2004, let it do the stress test for a 30 minutes (warning, your laptop might get hot, If you have cooling pads use them)

 

I had already used memtest86 - bootcd version overnight - 8 times test.
No ERRORS.. it must be the HDD ..performance is really bad not only in photoshop. When I open several programs at the same time it gets slow as hell. Damnn ..a brand new notebook

 

In your Event Viewer, do you have any ftdisk errors or other types of disk errors under System? ie: go to Start: Run then type 'eventvwr'.

If you don't have any after all this time, it is unlikely it's an HDD issue. They usually (but not always) sputter and cough before they start to die on you.

Did you monitor the temperature of the CPU while the system was running? If the temperature is too high, it will throttle your system. If you don't have any sort of power management program like NHC or Power4Gear running, or if you're running it on max performance settings, it might be throttling because it's running too hot.

Also, are you using memtest86 or memtest86+? The one that you should be using should be from http://www.memtest.org/.

If there was any sort of memory corruption from the previous RAM module really being bad, then any files that got damaged or corrupted can be causing your crash. Either way, you should try a reinstall of your system before going any further if there's no indication of disk problems in the Event Viewer.

 

Agreed, like I said before. Do a reinstall see if this repeats, there's a significant likelihood given your memtest results that it's just bad software.

 

vista, 1 gig of ram, working with large files in photoshop ... and hdd working like mad ...
I guess you might just be filling up the RAM to it's max and just swapping on HDD. Doesnt explain the BSODs though
What's the RAM usage like ?

 

http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=49935

this thread may be of help.