pc building woes

I've been unsure about posting about this for the last few weeks.

The reason I was telling myself was that I was afraid I might curse myself, as I kept thinking I'd solved the problem and then finding myself. So I didn't want to find what I thought was the final solution, but then the "yay" post caused it to fail.

This, of course, is superstition. It also isn't true. My fear was mainly of embarrassment - "yay, I've fixed it" followed by "no, I haven't." But then I realised I could write the post as a "I'm still trying to fix it" because I still am.

Anyway, a while back I think I mentioned how I was building a new PC. The reason was that the newest version of Civilization - Civ5 was coming out. No, that's not right. The excuse was that Civ5 was coming out. The reason is because I'm a huge nerd who isn't very sensible with his money.

The point is that I bought a load of new computer kit and built myself a new PC. The specs for the PC were:

• 850W power supply
• Gigabyte GA-P55-UD3 motherboard
• Intel 2.8GHz socket 1156 Quad-core Processor
• 4 lots of 2gb 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM
• 150gb SATA2 Hard Drive
• ATI HD5970 Graphics Card (this is a dual GPU graphics card)
• Windows 7 Pro 64bit

I had a Dickens of a time with a case to put it all in as I ordered a really swanky one, but it turned out that the graphics card was an absolute monster and it simply didn't fit. The case I use for my then current games machine was actually an oversized one, so I ended up doing all sorts of switching over.

So yeah, I put together the machine and then started the process of loading on Windows7. And that's when the problems started.

See, as windows was loading, there was an error. The error message wasn't hugely helpful, but a Google search suggested that there'd probably been some sort of copying error from the CD into either memory or RAM. This seemed very odd and what was more worrying was that restarting everything and giving it another go kept producing the same error.

But it was late when I was doing it, so I left it and tried again on another day. And that time it worked. But, when I finally got into windows proper, the real problems started. Basically, every so often the machine would crash. What's more it was a proper full-on crash - what's known as a Blue Screen of Death, or BSOD.

But weirdly, every time it crashed it gave the same error message of a "Memory Management" error. This gave the initial impression it was the RAM, but a search of the error codes online was inconclusive, because although other people had the same codes, the meaning of them was not explained by Microsoft.

But it seemed like RAM, so I downloaded something called Memtest 86. This runs from a CD and test your RAM by sending it binary codes and checking the accuracy of what comes back. Now because I had 4 sticks, the best thing to do was to run each stick during the day while I was at work and see which one failed.

Only none of them failed. I even tried slotting all of them in and running them all and that still didn't produce any errors.

So what the hell was wrong?

This post is already quite long, so I'll pick up on another day.