My xi1546 is in trouble.

Okay, so I bought this thing back in september for University.
Worked fine - FEAR, Oblivion, no sweat.

Nowadays though, when I play games such as World of Warcraft I have the following problems;


First came the alt tab freezes. The screen would go all blurred, the sound stop, and I would have to reset. Okay, fine I thought. I'll not alt tab..

This turned out to be a driver issue. I updated, only to find a new error.

Every 20 mins or so, I got a blue screen saying NMI Parity check error. System halted.
Easy! A bad memory module, right!?
Wrong. Again I updated my drivers and haven't had this blue screen since.


It does however still crash in the same way it used to - just without the blue screen. The sound goes choppy, screen freezes, and i reset.



Here's the thing - my CPU temperature is reaching 75 celcius each time this happens. Currently 60 writing this. It's sitting on an Akasa cooling stand.
Could it be the CPU temperature that is causing my problems?

 

The 75*C is normal.
HAve you tried memtest ? Something might be really wrong with the memory.
Which drivers did you try and which one you are currently using ?

 

8.261.0.0 at the moment. Everything is up to date according to FS's online driver checker.
The one before that prior. (I can't remember the name)

I downloaded memtest86 and attempted to check my memory, but my attempts ended in failure. I couldn't figure out how to make it work.

I think I burned something onto a cd and tried to boot from it, but nothing happened.

 

Wow, I just checked memory prices..

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=217961
Is it me or is that a huge change from 6 months ago when 1gb of that speed RAM would cost nearly £100?..

I think i'll be upgrading my RAM anyways, just gotta make sure it's not another component now. Clean up the insides.. slap some new AS5 on there..

 

You mean that you ran memtest and it failed ?

 

I don't know if it even did anything. It certainly didn't say anything obvious like 'Memtest will now begin!'

 

Just tried my cd again.

It gives me a DR-DOS prompt from the A drive or something.. and says something about some guy making something in 1998.
/shrug

 

ok...
1. Download memtest86+ Pre-Compiled Bootable ISO (.zip package) here: http://www.memtest.org/download/1.70/memtest86+-1.70.iso.zip
2. Unpack the .zip file
3. Burn the resultin .iso file to a blank cd with your cd burning software (e.g. with Nero). If you don't know how to do this, consult your CD burning program's documentation.
4. Boot your computer with the CD in it. Memtest86+ starts at the beginning of the reboot.
5. Let it run all test few times, maby three times. It may take hour or so. Press esc to stop testing. When done remove the CD from the drive.

More info: http://www.short-media.com/articles/diagnose_with_memtest86

 

hahahah, thats quite funny... im in exactly the same boat. yeah...massive drop..i got the EXACT same memory youre looking at from scan..great stuff...im running really really smooth now. as for problem...try old bios 7.xx...might be that...ive read a few accounts where the new bios goes a bit wrong and is a bit glitchy...try memtest aswell...ir worked on my old comp when things went wrong...i thought it was the cpu...turned out to be momory...

good luck

 

Just about to try that memtest thing, thanks. I couldn't get on yesterday.

I did however order 2gb of that memory and some AS5 paste anyways.




Something of note however - I recently downloaded NHC and looked at my voltages for the processor. I noticed that as the load increased it would start changing multipliers and voltages, increasing them and therefore the temperature would sometimes reach 85+. I'm now forcing the 6x multi and default 0.95v and haven't crashed in a long time.

 

Apologies for not adding to this sooner, I completely forgot to be honest.

A few days after my last post I called up Fujitsu. The next day a courier arrived to pick up my laptop, I went away for the weekend, and within a week Fujitsu had replaced a faulty VGA and it was back on my desk.

All this bearing in mind the fact that I had switched the paste for AS5, which technically voids the warranty I believe.

Anyways, top marks for Fujitsu-Siemens' customer service from me this time round.

Running 60 fps in all my games again, upgraded to 2gb ram & i'm very happy with everything.

 

Fine to hear that you have fixed it! Like I say: technicians at support of F&S don't mind attention to things like cooling paste and switching RAM.

Good luck! I have to leave now to catch my flight to Turkey.