I have a new[-ish] PC I built about four months ago with fresh hardware and
a fresh install of Windows XP, and since it was assembled I've always had
this problem.

Whenever the I/O is heavily pressed--specifically, whenever I use the
DVD-ROMs and hard drives with a lot of hard drive seeking, such as copying
multiple files from both DVD-ROMs to the hard drive at the same time, or
sometimes when I'm defragmenting the hard drive--I will eventually get a
BSOD ("MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION" or something similar, a useless error which
can mean anything from bad memory to hot temperatures to bad drivers).

I'm not sure what to think of this. The CPU temperature readout says that
it's pretty darn cool. Might be the hard drive temperature, but I don't know
what to think of that since the hard drive is spaced out in its own drive
slot with plenty of room to breathe.

The case side fan blows in and not out. Is this correct?

Ideas?

My configuration:

M/B - MSI K8N Neo4 w/ nVidia nForce 4
CPU - AMD Athlon 64 3000+
Memory - 1GB (tests check out)
Hard drive - Western Digital WD3200JD (320GB Serial-ATA)
O/S - Windows XP Pro SP2 (w/ latest nVidia nForce drivers)

Jon

I have uninstalled the nVidia IDE drivers and will monitor to see if there
further errors. I'll post here if errors continue.

Jon

On Thu, 1 Sep 2005 18:23:12 -0700, "Jon Davis"
<jon@REMOVE.ME.PLEASE.jondavis.net> wrote:

You can also go into you system properties and enable the machine to
create a mini-dump when it blue screens. Once you have a mini-dump,
you can use a program called dumpchk.exe to analyze the crash dump,
see the system call stack, and find where the instruction pointer was
at the time of the crash. The BSOD may not look meaningful, but
there's a lot of information in the exception parameters and in values
that were in the registers at the time of the crash. This has been
instrumental for me in the past in debugging very difficult BSOD's and
tracing down faulty drivers and hardware...

"Jon Davis" <jon@REMOVE.ME.PLEASE.jondavis.net> wrote in message
news:18ORe.7361$UI.4449@okepread05...
memory?
Mike.

My first impression is that you may have an underpowered/unstable power
supply unit. You may want to try installing a more powerful High Quality
(stable) brand of PSU and see if that fixes it.

--
DaveW
"Jon Davis" <jon@REMOVE.ME.PLEASE.jondavis.net> wrote in message
news:JPNRe.7358$UI.3561@okepread05...

"Jon Davis" <jon@REMOVE.ME.PLEASE.jondavis.net> wrote in message
news:18ORe.7361$UI.4449@okepread05...
If anyone is watching this thread, uninstalling the nVidia IDE drivers seems
to have solved the problem.

Jon

"Jon Davis" <jon@REMOVE.ME.PLEASE.jondavis.net> wrote in message
news:YAeVe.17575$UI.16505@okepread05...
driver. If you are using standard Microsoft driver for IDE controller you
will be losing a lot of performance.
Mike.

I had the latest driver installed all along.

Jon