VISTA PROBLEMS! Please help!

Okay I recently bought a computer which I built by myself with some friends, and I have had some problems. Upon installation of Windows Home Premium 64 bit, I receive blue screen error messages. Usually they happen when I am trying to open a file, or if I am installing updates for anything. It either goes to a blue screen, or it will completely freeze, and I'll have to reboot. Sometimes upon rebooting, my computer will get stuck in between the loading screens for Vista, it will get past the Microsoft Corporation loading bar, but get stuck on a black screen before the vista symbol shows up.

I have some friends that think its my RAM, because I have had 2 sticks of ram in, totaling 4gb, and others think its the Video card. below is a list of all my components. Please help me!!

Vga EVGA 512-P3-N801-AR 8800GT 512MB

CPU AMD|PHENOM 9600 2.3GHz 65N R

Windows Home Premium 64 Bit

Motherboard GIGABYTE GA-MA790X-DS4 AM2+ RTL

PSU PC Power and Cooling | S75QB BK 700 Watt

Memory 2GB x2 G. Skill F2-6400CL5S-2GBPQ R

Hard drive 320Gb Western Digital 7K 8M SATA2 WD3200AAJS
and DVD Burner Samsung SH-S203N SATA LS

Any help would be much appreciated... I had ot resort to using my school computers!

Hello Venom714,

I do not have much experience in PC but I've just finished to build my new rig with Vista Home Premium x64 and it gave me BSoD and very long time to load OS until I unplugged my USB connection for my Wireless Mouse, it looks that Vista becomes very unstable if USB are plugged.
Since I started with out USB mouse (only PS2 Keyboard) and once in Vista plug the USB, Vista detected it as new hardware installed some drivers by itself and since then I have no problem. No long Load , No BSoD.

If you have any device with USB, try to unplug them until your Vista is running.

Hope that can help

While setting up, only put in 2GB of RAM. Through Windows Updates, you'll end up with a patch that will make it work fine. At this point, though, Vista still doesn't play nice with >2GB for installation.

Hey yeah I am now installing Vista with no problems yet. I am installing all the updates now. Should I install my vidoe card drivers and mobo drivers with just 1 stick of 2gigs in? And how do I know when its safe to put up to 4gig in?

when Vista is completely installed, then you can put in your 4GB.

Okay now it froze up on installing updates. I could still move around on my computer, but the updates wouldn't finish. Was on the 6th update out of 52 for about 2 hours.

Well, it kept freezing, although I didn't hit any blue screens. I installed a few updates, but I couldn't find the hot fix that I needed on any of hte updates that were available for me to download. Now I am running memtest on the stick of RAM that I have in right now just tso see if maybe it is bad.

Anybody else have any ideas... Please, feel free to throw em out there.. Any help would be nice, ANY at all haha

EDIT: UPdate: Well, both of the ram sticks checked out, passed boht tests. I found out that there could be a problem with my CPU because I guess theres a defect on most of the Phenom 2600 Black Editions, but that was fixed by just Underclocking the 3rd core. Now I don't get any blue screens (knock on wood) but I continue to get random freezes in the middle of updates. Also, it will freeze while booting up or shutting down.

Anyboyd know why this is?

Oh, and I'm not sure if I stated this, but I installed vista again with just 1 stick of RAM. I heard htat that fixes most thigns for most people. And it helped a bit, but now I'm runnin into the problems that i stated in the above post.

I was wondering if I would run into the same problems if i just went and changed to 64 bit XP??

Try this one if you did not find yet the Microsoft Hotfix for using more than 3 GB RAM. or you can dowload it directly from Microsoft support use the KB# of the name of the file attached and google, you should find it quickly