random crashing

surfgeko · Post by **surfgeko** » Mon Nov 27, 2006 11:49 pm

Hey guys, every once in a while, my computer would randomly restart, I didn't know if it was crashing or what, so I clicked the little check box so it would give me a BSOD rather than just restarting. So now, it happens about once a day give or take, and the error is PFN_LIST_CORRUPT 9/10 times (I’ve gotten some weird other ones, but very rarley) I'm guessing that my ram connections are bad so it's corrupting the ram access. Anyone have any theories? My setup is an NVIDIA 6600GT, 768 Meg of ram (can’t remember brand, but it's old), an AMD Sempron 2800+ at 2 GHz and a 150 gig Seagate drive.

BTW. Separate problem, but whenever I start a program, 8/10 times it starts two of that process, yup, two. One takes all of my cpu it can, and the other one is just regular, normal. If I kill the mem hog, nothing happens except my cpu usage goes down; the program doesn't crash, so it has nothing to do with its "normal" counterpart. If I don't kill the "dummy" process, it will eventually run for 10 mins or so, and crash itself, not my computer, but the process will just crash.

These problems might be connected, but i dunno, any insight from the geekier-than-me people out there?

Post by **Shades_of_Grey** » Tue Nov 28, 2006 12:35 am

Have you recently installed any new hardware or drivers? If so, that might be causing your problem, and you should try rolling back the drivers. If not, you might want to test your RAM with something like MemTest to see if it is corrupt.

surfgeko · Post by **surfgeko** » Tue Nov 28, 2006 12:36 am

No new drivers, but i'll google this memtest thing

surfgeko · Post by **surfgeko** » Tue Nov 28, 2006 8:28 pm

the memtest thing didnt work, it just stayed at 0%

Post by **Shades_of_Grey** » Tue Nov 28, 2006 10:47 pm

Which MemTest did you use? I generally use the one found here: http://hcidesign.com/memtest/, it doesn't require you to put it on a disk. If it stops at 0%, try telling it to allocate less RAM. If it just stops without any error dialogs, that probably just means you're telling it to allocate more RAM than than Windows can provide without going to the swapfile.

Post by **-999-** » Wed Nov 29, 2006 12:05 am

Drivers, faulty program, virus, ram, mobo, and cpu are all possibilities. Make sure to update all your drivers, and get the newest revision of directx. Disable any extra programs you have running in the background. Go to run, and type "sfc /scannow" to scan for pooched dll's.

The double programs start could be something simple like clicking too many times, or it could be a virus which injects itself into the reserved memory and takes over the duplicate, which could make them related but too early to tell. Make sure you update your antivirus and do a full scan, preferably from safemode first.