Stinky's BF3 system crash woes

[[JiF]Uncle Stinky]

Damn. I just got my desktop back two days ago from HP, who replaced the motherboard based on a class action suit. It was working fine the first day, but last night I got a black screen and crash to re-boot three times after logging onto BF3. The first time it happened after about 20 minutes of play, the last time just as the program started to load.

I'm going to try playing Skyrim on Ultra settings for a while to see if I can replicate the crash. I'll also swap out my new vid card for the old one to see if that's the issue.

Any other suggestions?

Two things to add - I'll also try dialing down the graphics settings, and installing the latest nVidia beta drivers for my GTX 460.

[[JiF]Riceman]

First thing I would do would check to make sure that nothing is loose. Sometimes something as simple as loose ram or a simple connector could cause weird issues like this, and since you just got your machine back from being worked on, its likely that something just isnt secured right. Also, when was the last time you cleaned our your machine? Dust can cause weird issues like these since they tend to cause overheating and other issues.

Anyways, I would always check those things first before you start troubleshooting hardware related issues. Hope you get your rig back up on running asap!

[[JiF]Uncle Stinky]

Well, I did open up my machine and ensure everything was slooted in correctly, and managd at least an hour or play last night with no crashes. Let's see what the future holds.

[[JiF]KellysHero]

Did you remove and reset everything or just wiggle it a little? Sometimes a driver upgrade is all that is required as well.

[[JiF]Uncle Stinky]

Well, it got worse and worse. Sunday was a ....really....bad....day.

Saturday night the system kept crashing to boot. The final time, the ocmputer owul dnot reastart - after I hit the power,. I heard a loud beeping from the motherboard. I went on-line wiht my laptop and saw that could mean a RAM problem.

So Sunday morning I decided to recheck the RAM stick were in properly. To do this, I had to remove the hard drvie case. I reslooted the stick, but when I went to put the hard drive case, the place where a cable plugs into the HD broke off. As in, there is now no way to connect the HD to the MB cable. From what I can tell, I just hosed my 1 TB hard drive.

I'm at a point now where I want to chuck this piece of HP crap into the garbage, after scavenging the vid card and the 9 gigs of RAM, and get a new computer. I can't see shelling out for a new HD to go with a computer that might still have a MB problem and thus cost more. Since I won't need a monitor or (hopefully) RAM, I figure I could get a basic model for a pretty good price.

Any advice on what to look for in terms of CPU, HD or other stuff?

[[JiF]Gib]

I went to put the hard drive case, the place where a cable plugs into the HD broke off.

Well, you might be able to repair that unless you broke the "pegboard" as it were. How/where exactly did it break? You can try looking up and shipping to a drive repair place. I did that a few years back and they didnt charge me, they looked at it and said they would tell me that if it is fixable they would send a quote and I could respond yes/no and if no they'd just ship the drive back.