blue screen of death & system hangs

Hi everyone,

I’m new here and just spent a few hundred dollars upgrading my PC only to be plagued by instability and the BSOD, and quite frequently, at that. Here’s my story:

Have had this PC for about 2 years now (and worked like a charm: never any problems whatsoever). The original specs were:
-Windows XP Pro (SP2)
-SONATA case with SMART 450 watt PSU
-Amd 64 3000
-Nforce A8N-E Motherboard
-MSI 6600GT 128 mb
-1 x 512mb pc3200 samsung ddr400 DIMM
-120 gig drive

After the first year, I upgraded the GPU to a EVGA 7900GT. No problems. No crashes, etc. Then, shortly after that, I decided to put another stick of the same OEM Samsung ram in for a total of 1 gig. Ran like a charm, no problems. Then, just a few days ago, I decided to get that last final performance boost out of the system (before having to upgrade entirely) by purchasing a new OEM AMD x2 3800 CPU and another 2 sticks of the Samsung ram and an Enermax FMAII PSU (ATX 12V).
New specs:

Mainboard : Asus A8N-E
Chipset : nVidia nForce4
Processor : AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ @ 2000 MHz
Physical Memory : 2048 MB (4 x 512 DDR-SDRAM )
Video Card : Nvidia Corp GeForce 7900 GT
Hard Disk : ST3120827AS (120 GB)
Hard Disk : ST3320620AS (320 GB)
DVD-Rom Drive : BENQ DVD DD DW1640
DVD-Rom Drive : HL-DT-ST DVD-RAM GSA-H22N
Monitor Type : Samsung SyncMaster - 17 inches
Operating System : Microsoft Windows XP Professional 5.01.2600 Service Pack 2
DirectX : Version 9.0c (November 2006)

After all these new hardware components were added, it started up fine. But I noticed shortly thereafter when running multiple applications (ex. such as a couple browsers open, nero, and winamp altogether. I’ve also had it crash when loading IE or some 3d games like BF2) that the system would either hang or go to the BSOD: 0x0000009c (0x00000004, 0x8054d5f0, 0xb2000000, 0x00070f0f). There seems to be some randomness to the crashes though. I know people say this is a hardware failure code, but I’ve run memtest (no errors), the CPU seems to be running fine (temperatures between mid-30s to high 40’s C) with Amd dualcore optimizer installed and Microsoft dualcore fix and I’ve got the newest AMD chipset drivers (I believe) and AMD BIOS version 1010. I also used a registry clean program, defragged my drives, and don’t have any malware/spyware that I’m aware of. Also, I’ve never OC’ed this system or customized the BIOS. I read something somewhere about minidump files, so I’ve located the newest one on my PC here, in case that’s of some help to someone.

I don’t know what else to do, besides format and reinstall XP, but I’m hesitant to do that, especially if it won’t help anyways. Any computer experts here who have some leads I can follow? Thanks guys, I'm really appreciative for any help.

 

Any ideas anyone?


I know BSOD questions must be boring over and over again.

 

Machine Check error--yes, hardware related.

Try going back to original gig of ram. If you can't reproduce the error, try the other pair.

The MS KB yields this.. (thanks ozrom) and this... (thanks Rollin' Rog).

Rollin' Rog might also recommend these:

Beginners Guides: Diagnosing Bad Memory

Windows Memory Diagnostic

Memtest86 - A Stand-alone Memory