A call for help from the PC guru's out there...

Hey guys... just registered, hoping someone out there can help me with my problem.

I've just built myself a new PC, nice little setup for what i paid for it, but i'm being haunted by occasional BSOD's. Happens about once a day, more if im unlucky. Been trying to pin down exactly what is causing it but im stumped...

The error i get is the same every time. It comes up with SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION and the error code is STOP: 0x0000003B

No file names are ever mentioned, always that same BSOD. I'm running Vista Home Premium, the 64 bit edition. Interestingly enough while i was waiting for Microsoft to mail me the 64bit version of Vista i was using my old 32bit version, and i never had this crash. I didnt have it installed for long, so i don't know if i was just lucky, or if this is something that is specific to the 64bit version of Vista.

These are my PC specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 2.66GHz
4GB Ram: OCZ DDR2 800MHz
Nvidia Geforce 8800 GTS 512MB
ASUS P5B motherboard
500 GB Seagate HD
And the rest, keyboard mouse etc which i doubt is important. 700W PSU as well which i think should be enough.

It's kinda hard to reproduce the fault, it mostly happens when i'm playing games, but has also crashed randomly when doing Vista stuff, and once when reading a very long email with my PC doing literally nothing else, so not like i was taxing it...

Some things i have noticed though, which is leading me to believe it might be the graphics card. When playing WoW, i have had it crash multiple times at certain specific points. After being killed and releasing my corpse, soon as i hit the button to pop to ghost it's crashed and burned, and also i seem to have it happen a lot when i exit the game, either from in the game itself or logging out and exiting from the main menu. But then it's also been known to just crash at seemingly random points.

Thought it could be dodgy ram, so i've done a full memory test, using the windows one and also memtest86 i think its called. Left my PC on overnight with it running, woke up and no errors at all.
Using the latest drivers for everything thats in it, tried using beta drivers as well for the graphics card but it didnt help so i uninstalled and went back to the normal driver.

Bit stuck now...
Anyone out there that can shed some light on this?

Cheers,
Ryan

Hey,

I assume you've got all the Windows Updates that come across naturally. Are you running SP1 in any variety, or just the stuff that normally comes up?

Try looking here and grabbing any and all of them listed in the top post and making sure they've all been applied or don't need to be. Sometimes these solve things: http://www.vistax64.com/gaming/12099...pu-memory.html

Another thing to try is pulling 2 GB of RAM (are you on 4 1GB sticks or 2 2GB sticks?). Until the >3GB Hotfix is applied, sometimes there are issues.

Best of luck.

Hey there, I just read a bunch of threads on this same error. 3 of 'em fixed it by replacin' there ram. Maybe you got a bad stick in there.

I was using normal Vista, but have since just upgraded to SP1 since it became available, but it's made no difference. I've tried using all of those hotfixes, but each one i download and try to run it tells me it does not apply to my system. Either i've already picked these up before, or they aren't needed with SP1, or something similar to that, but either way it looks like thats something ive already tried.

Whats this 3GB hotfix... I had heard something about this, but i thought it applied to 32bit versions of Windows, or am i wrong on that one? I've not tried anything like that yet.

I've got 4x1GB sticks of ram in my machine, all are identicle, bought them all together.

From what little information i could find on google, it seemed to point to ram being the problem. Memory tests didnt pick anything up though... Think it could be that? How would i go about pinpointing which stick is dodgy, or should i just send the whole lot back?

The way to pinpoint it would be run 1 stick at a time and see if the error goes away. If it doesn't go away, then It's probably not the RAM.