Computer has trouble reading from RAM/HDD it seems

[Edgar]

Hi there,

lately (the last month) I am plagued with Blue Screens and Crit Errors during gaming.

I get Bluescreens about the kmixer.sys and another STOP-Bluescreen. At the beginning of last month I got crit errors in WoW about a texture (Shaman T8 shoulders) it was not able to read, so I copied over an old version of my WoW folder I had on an external disk and it ran fine for ~2 weeks until he had trouble reading the Furious Glad. DK shoulders. Instead of copying over my old WoW again I decided to go for a full new re-install.

Today I tried to get into ZulGurub and it crit error me for a doodad texture it could not read. After raging for a while I shut down my computer, opened it and checked the parts, RAM felt a little hot so I decided to dust off everything and put the RAM in a different slot, thinking maybe it is the RAM slot that making trouble.

Prior to this I ran HD Tune to check my HD and I ran memtest to look for errors in my RAM, both bringing up nothing.

This obviously leaves me wondering, what is making my computer have trouble reading stuff from my HD/RAM.

My computer is fairly old but here are some specs:

Windows XP SP2
AMD Athlon XP 3000+
Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe (nForce2)
WD WD800BB (80GB IDE HDD) + Samsung SP2 2504C (250GB SATA HDD)
1 GB G.E.I.L. Ram
nVidia GeForce FX5700

Windows and WoW run off the WD HDD. I did not resort to formating my PC yet.

What leaves me really wondering is why it's always a different file that WoW has trouble with but until I do something to fix it, it stays the same.


Hope someone can help, if you need more info just ask.

Thanks
Edge

[Specpally]

XP... :3 I still don't see how people cand stand using it... Vista run perfectly fine for me.

I'd say update your comp. specs. You could use a better processor, more RAM and a better graphics card.

What I'm thinking of (at the moment... I'm at work so I can't do all the things I could do at home ) is that your graphics card isn't able to render certain textures. Do you have another graphics card that you could use to test?

The 5700 is 7(?) series back, which is quite some time ago.

Doing minor tweaking can help.

[Avandd]

I started having the same problems as you described and it was driving me crazy. I finally narrowed it down to a bad stick of ram. Find and download memtest and test each stick of memory and you'll find at least one is bad. I would get bsod, unable to read texture errors, intermittently. At first I thought I had an overheating problem but bad memory was the key. Good Luck.

[Avandd]

Just to clarify, I ran each stick of ram separately to find the problem, running memtest with all sticks in at once did not find the faulty ram even after running memtest for awhile.

[BWarner]

Also, I have a similar issue currently, and am about to start testing to see if it's just a bad hard disk (a ridiculously large number of trashed sectors). It could certainly be a memory issue, but I/m inclined to believe the former.

[Moridin Of Galakrond]

I've been having a similar problem, but no blue screen. I get texture read errors sometimes while playing. When I try to restart WoW, I'll either get the error again, or it'll say directx is not installed. When I restart my PC everything works fine. Hopefully it's not a HD problem.

[Edgar]

XP... :3 I still don't see how people cand stand using it... Vista run perfectly fine for me.

XP does the job for me. Runs fine on my machine and is giving me no trouble, so why "upgrade".

I finally narrowed it down to a bad stick of ram.

I only have the 1gig stick and that has been tested, but today during cleaning out my PC I put it into another RAM slot and up until now, no blue screen, no crit errors.

I've been having a similar problem, but no blue screen. I get texture read errors sometimes while playing.

Restarting my computer does nothing for me. When I first had this error I didn't even think about running WoW's repair.exe and just copied over my old WoW folder. I then reinstalled and now I ran the repair.exe and it downloaded 40kbytes, apparently the texture that was missing and it works fine for now.


Let's hope it stays that way.

[Khilbron]

If you can relocate your RAM and perform for days to weeks before the problem happens again, it definately sounds like you have a faulty RAM Module, and by swapping slots your gradually destroying the available memory slots on your motherboard. As stated above I recommend getting memtest and making sure that the stick is good. If you arent familiar with it, you can have the local computer store wherever your at, or the geek squad run memtest on it (it costs about $40-60 depending on the store)

[ttocs]

I've had some weird intermittent issues with things like that as well, but it's hard to pinpoint a cause. How long did you run memtest?

Also, did you run chkdsk to make sure the partition is OK?