In Over My Head - Advice?

Sorry if this is long-winded but my computer knowledge is limited especially with Vista and laptops (never messed with either much till now) so I'm listing everything I can.

I bought a p-6831fx at the end of Feburary and upon getting it I immediately started cleaning the bloatware off of it since it was gonna be my primary gaming computer. I also installed a new gpu driver because my driver keep giving me errors. After doing all this I was getting between 10-15 errors a day (superfetch, windows explorer stopped working, IE7 crashing, something IP stopped working and other stuff I dont remeber). And although annoying I was still playing all my games fine. But then WOW started crashing constantly (right after SP1 and patch 2.4 for the game not sure if it was either of those since wow runs fine on 2 other comps 1 vista also, 1xp) and I was never sure why so I tried to repair it. It found nothing wrong so I uninstalled it. When I tried re-installing it, it would always error out. It told me that it thought I had faulty ram (which I haven't checked yet cuz it looks like a pain booting from a disc and just leaving it be). I thought the install problem might be registry related so I installed CC Cleaner and ran it. But it totally fcked up all of windows so I used its restore function but it still didn't help. After this screw up on my part I decided to do a clean install of Vista and start over new hoping to fix my problems. I did this last night but I still can't install WOW, just did UT3 and it installed and ran fine.

My question is should I replace/test the ram and see if it is found faulty or should I contact Gateway and try to get a new HDD? Is there something I listed that I did that is taboo (should never have been done)? I've tried everything I know and the problems just keep getting worse and worse and I'm not sure if I caused them or if my comp was fubar when I bought it.

Thanks for any advice because I'm pissed right now and want this fixed...

 

I would call gateway, and try to get a replacement HD, or do a clean install of vista, make a driver disk first.

 

Gateway was pretty easy getting a HD out of. I had an issue with all Windows based software being corrupt and they sent out a new HD in two days.

 

Well if your playing UT3 fine than its something to do with WOW, any time you try to remove bloatware manually there is a chance of screwing something up!

 

"After doing all this I was getting between 10-15 errors a day (superfetch, windows explorer stopped working, IE7 crashing, something IP stopped working and other stuff I dont remeber). And although annoying I was still playing all my games fine."

Hmm. If you bought from retail outlet, then you must use the worthless non 800 GW support number. You might save some pain buy bitting the bullet and do as suggested with the OS install and make sure you make your driver disk. If it is the a bad HD you have not wasted much time and this should show up during the Vista install from your HD partition. You should learn to do this at any rate. Read again your owners manual for the steps.

 

If you really think its the HDD you can run WD's diagnostic test which you can download from their site.

 

Thanks for the advice...I had already done a clean install and continued having some of the same issues which made me think it was hardware related (wow not installing/superfetch/windows explorer crashing). WOW told me it was faulty ram so I decided to test it and the hdd. Everything I did hdd wise came back clean but 2 different programs I used to test the reading and writing of the ram reported errors. I guess this makes sense looking back at all the errors I was having (seemed to occur more often when caching files ie superfetch). Its almost 2am here and I have an 8am class so I'm calling it a night but tomorrow I guess I'll finally open this baby up and reseat the ram. Beyond that I guess I'll pull and test each stick seperately...fun times

Thanks again and any more advice would be appreciated (hope gateway will send me some ram if thats the issue, not looking forward to running Vista on the 2-512mb sticks I have lying around).

EDIT: Well I have confirmed that the 2gb stick of ram (dimm 1) that came with my computer is faulty. Once i took out the 1gb stick and just booted with it I would get the bsod within minutes. Time to contact Gateway I guess. Also did anyone else think the way the ram was placed in the computer was weird? I mean they are almost stacked on top of each other...

 

Good job trouble shooting on the ram. Did everything boot fine with just the 1 gig stick, I assumed you did that? Did you try re-seating the 2 gig stick?

Every laptop I've owned has had the ram stacked but never, yet, had a problem, just dying HD or GPU's for me.

 

Every laptop I've seen the ram is installed the same way.

 

Yeah everything booted and tested fine with the 1gb of ram although it was noticeably slower....70% usage at bootup that only dropped down to 45% or so. I did reseat the 2gb stick once right before I ran the computer with just it but without the 1gb stick carrying the workload it was very unstable. BSOD within minutes all 3 times I reset it. I have never had problems with ram before (beyond having a DOA stick and having to reseat it once) and I'm amazed the computer ran as long as it did with a faulty stick....learn something new everyday.

And to anyone reading this if your computer is constanly throwing up errors (superfetch in particular) but still running you might want to check into your ram because Gateway might have went the same cheap route I think they went with the LCD/processor on the p-6831fx.

 

Actually you may have Samsung Ram, a top maker in Ram chips. They are very static sensitive with reports of damage showing months after the fact. Then again someone may have sneezed in the vat

DIMM3: Samsung M4 70T5663CZ3-CE6 - 2 GB DDR2-667 DDR2 SDRAM (5-5-5-15 @ 333 MHz) (4-4-4-12 @ 266 MHz) (3-3-3-9 @ 200 MHz)