I am making one final appeal for assistance here before closing the issue (at least, until I find a solution) of my randomly-freezing desktop, a plague that has consumed me and my custom-built computer for the last two years. For reference, here are all the previous postings I’ve made about the problem:
- Feb 7, 2009
- March 24, 2009
- April 21, 2009
- April 25, 2009
- January 26, 2010 (disgustingly-detailed full history)
- June 6, 2010
This has been a blast. Emphasis on "blast".
After effectively replacing or swapping out every single component in the machine (CPU, motherboard, memory, hard drive, IDE drives, case, PSU, internal cables), I’ve decided just to replace the guts of the computer itself and see what happens – new CPU, motherboard, and memory combination.
My reasoning? Not particularly sound, to be honest, but after two trips to the Geek Squad and fewer answers than when I started, I feel as though I’m left with little alternative at this point, short of tossing out every component and starting from scratch. Geek Squad wasn’t able to reproduce the freezing behavior, even after 48 hours of continuously running 3DMark Vantage. I have, however, replaced my peripherals (in case you thought those could be the culprit, as I did at one point).
I mean, I suppose it’s possible that my monitors – which I’ve had since my sophomore year at Georgia Tech – could be feeding back through the video card and causing problems that way? Or the VGA/DVI cables are somehow defective and causing problems? …yeah that’s pretty much all I got left.
Here are the parts I’m looking at using: Gigabyte LGA 1366 motherboard, Intel Core i7-930 CPU, and G-SKILL 3x2GB memory.
The only flaw in all this, of course, is that there’s no guarantee that this new $700 collection of goodies will even fix the problem. Granted, my current motherboard needs to be replaced anyway – a few months ago the onboard SATA ports started eating my cables, in a very literal sense, and now only 2 of the 4 ports can be used – but as far as I can tell, my current Core 2 Quad CPU and 8GB of memory are working just fine. The CPU was the first item I’d RMA’d, but perhaps I just happened to get two bunk CPUs? Or I somehow damaged them both the same way?
Who knows. Seriously. This stuff is like voodoo magic sometimes, not made any easier by the fact that gamma rays may very well cause our systems to behave erratically.
If anyone has any final suggestions (I’m going to put in this order tomorrow), I’d love to hear them. Any assurance that this next step will actually work would be appreciated; I hate the feeling of spending this kind of money without any guarantee of success. Yet another reason why, as much as I love the debates, I could never get into politics 😛
Theatre of Consciousness 