Help me help a friend fix his PC.

[Phred]

A friend of mine bought a Dell last year and is having trouble with it. It crashes on any modern game it seems (Conan, Eve). Dell support seems to be obsessed with installing drivers to fix his problem but it sounds more to me like a hardware issue. I know Eve (and probably Conan) use memory pretty aggressively so I suggested he download and run memtest 86.

Also I suggested he try installing xp on it because I'd heard that Vista caused problems for some people with games. He didnt want to remove his Vista install so I suggested he use partition magic to add a second C drive and dual boot but he claims that Vista has some kind of boot disk autorun program that might interfere with Boot Magic. Has anyone used Boot/Partition magic on Vista? Anyone have any other suggestions on things he can try? Oh ya, hardware wise he has a nvidia 8600 gt and some kind of intel processor.

[Trippy]

When you say "crashes" what does that mean? Is the whole machine freezing? Crashing to desktop? BSoD (does Vista have a BSoD?)? Rebooting?

What's the GPU temp when running those games? Trying different drivers is actually a good suggestion.

[Murgos]

does Vista have a BSoD?)?

Yes.

[Phred]

When you say "crashes" what does that mean? Is the whole machine freezing? Crashing to desktop? BSoD (does Vista have a BSoD?)? Rebooting?

What's the GPU temp when running those games? Trying different drivers is actually a good suggestion.

I just phoned him for confirmation, it's the computer. He says the screen blacks out and his operating system is what is crashing basically. He found a Dell supplied memory tester program installed and ran that and it locked up the computer too. He says he's never seen Vista's bsod. He also mentioned he has locked the computer up in the BIOS screen. He's going to swap in the memory from his old computer and see how that works.

[Ingmar]

If he bought it last year, surely he's still under support from Dell?

[Phred]

If he bought it last year, surely he's still under support from Dell?

He says every time he's got in touch with support all they do is download and install drivers which doesn't help.

[Ingmar]

If he bought it last year, surely he's still under support from Dell?

He says every time he's got in touch with support all they do is download and install drivers which doesn't help.

The key with Dell support is just to be very forceful that you know what you're talking about. I'd bet that if he gives them the information about the memtest and is pushy enough they'll send him new memory (and a box to send the old memory back in.) I do this pretty frequently at work - now that he's talked to them a few times he can probably cut through all of their 'do this, do that' steps that they try to make you go through on every call just by telling them he's already done this that and the other thing.

[Brolan]

This is why I hate buying pre-built systems.  You have to deal with tech support that knows less about computers than you do.

[schild]

Having worked tech support for a long time, I am confident to say this:

We know a lot more than you, we just don't give a shit. ^_^

[Ralence]

I just phoned him for confirmation, it's the computer. He says the screen blacks out and his operating system is what is crashing basically.

  Screen blacking out sounds like a video card issue to me, especially if it only happens when he's playing games.  OS crashing would give you a BSoD and reboot.  If he's losing video, which is what it sounds like, that would be my first place to start checking.  Does his monitor give him the "No Digital Input" error when it happens?  Or does the thing auto-reboot?  Or how about does it lock up totally and have to be rebooted manually?  Heat issues or bad ram on the vid card would cause the reboot cycle and the blackout of the screen.

  You can also have him fire up a ton of memory intensive, yet non-GPU intensive stuff and see if he can crash it that way, which would lean more towards a ram issue than the video situation.  Max out the available memory and start running into swap, that will cause mem crashes if that's the problem.

  A lot of games have really detailed error logs, and IIRC, Eve is one of them, may want to play around with what he has installed and see if you can replicate/track down the error within the program itself.

[Phred]

Ok All. Problem solved. Thanks for all the help. On my pestering, he removed his memory to try the memory from his old computer. That didn't fit his current one so he put the memory back in and restarted the computer, and, it started working fine. It went through 3 cycles of Dell's memory tester without issue and ran the games he was having trouble with. So it sounds like it was dust on the memory connector (not gonna be corrosion I don't think as both connectors are gold plated aren't they?)

Just to make his day I sent him a link to that Nvidia story seeing as he has an 8600 vid card.