[katjaneway]

Ok, this probelm is actually happening on my husband's system, which is running Vista x64 Home Basic. The computer, while happily doing nothing, will black out randomly. It's not a sleep mode or anything - the "Digital/Analog" monitor option appears in the corner, and no amount of mouse waving will get the screen back. The only way out of it is to reboot the system. It does sometimes happen while we are trying to do something (most recently while trying to diagnose a network connection issue) and it often happens before I try to print from my computer to the network printer that is phyically attached to his system. (When the printer doesn't start printing but my computer says everything is fine is when I notice it). He thinks it's a memory issue, so I've been trying to test the RAM with Windows Mem Diagnostic 1 stick at a time. He has 2 sticks of 2gig Crucial Ballistix which is pretty new. Also, because of an issue he was having with World of Warcraft where the game crashes and gives a critical error, he wiped his HDD and started over. Mere minutes after doing so, his computer went blank. (and it's also saying that while trying to reinstall WoW that it's severely corrupted and can not finish) I dunno if that's related or not. Oh, he also said he tried installing WoW onto our external HDD and it still failed so we don't think it's a HDD issue. Does anyone think it's a memory issue? Could it be a video card issue or a video card memory issue? That might cause the game to crash and this to happen but I'm not sure.

[katjaneway]

Update - Windows Mem Diagnostic finally got unstuck from 21% with a single stick of RAM and it's saying "Hardware problems were detected." Will now try the other stick and see if it says the same thing.

[golddust]

Bad memory stick is a possibility. I know someone who recently got a bad memory stick through Crucial. Don't know who the manufacturer was though.

[katjaneway]

The weirdest thing happened to me after I quit the diagnostic on the first piece of RAM, I tried rebooting the computer with the other RAM stick, with Vista in the drive, just like the first time, told it to read the CD, just like the first time, but instead of bringing me to the DOS screen where it says to choose from installing Windows and the Diagnostic, it decided to go to the screen to install Windows. I never got another chance to run the diagnostic, I tried rebooting several times and the option never came up. So, hopefully the first RAM stick was the issue, we will need to do some stress tests on the untested one to see if we're having the same problem. Wiped the computer again btw, WoW is installing fine from a different DVD. (Go fig) If it is the memory, and it happens again, I will try putting it in a different slot. If the real problem is the motherboard I would say never buy Intel. lol

[golddust]

Reason I mentioned Crucial is that it is possible that a certain manufacturer may have gotten a bad batch of memory sticks. Wish I knew who the manufacturer the party I know about came from.