Hey guys,
Ive been having issues with my computer for a LONG time and I'm looking for some suggestions before I decide to throw it out the window
... or just into the hands of someone that repairs computers.. ANYWAY.. I have a custom-built computer.. Windows XP SP2.. Its probably about 4 or 5 years old now..
About 6 or 7 months ago, I started getting stop errors with "random" errors it seemed every time I would watch video.. After doing some research I thought that it was probably my onboard video card acting up. I decided to go buy a video card and see what happened.... Well this made things worst than before. The stop errors came more frequently.
After taking out the new video card and re-installing the drivers for my onboard card, I did some more research... Since every stop error I was getting was so random and hardly ever the same, I thought that maybe I was dealing with some bad RAM.. I went out and bought 2 extra sticks of RAM to check the sticks of RAM that I already had because I thought they both were corrupted.. AGAIN i still get the stop errors.. I even tried doing a complete format on my partition and installed a clean version of XP. It took me a LONG time to do this, because I was STILL getting stop errors while I was trying to format AND install. I got in the computer and jiggled around the hard drive wires and made sure everything was secure. I finally got everything installed back onto my computer, drivers and all... and I was kind of back to where I was at in the beginning. Getting stop errors whenever I goto a site that has too much info on it or watch a video.. Again, these are completely random.. never the same.
FINALLY after much exhaustion and just living with the errors for a couple of weeks, I decided to say *screw it* and go get me a new hard drive because I thought that this HAD to be the problem.... I mean i already replaced the video card, 2 sticks of RAM... so now I went to the hard drive. My old hard drive was a 40G, so I thought I found my problem right there. I bought an IDE 160GB hard drive and installed it today.. after hours of going through the whole installation process....drivers, programs, etc.... MY COMPUTER IS STILL RESTARTING!! As you can imagine, I am tired of spending money on things that are not fixing the problem. I was just wondering if a faulty 40-pin connector cable could be doing this?? I just used the cable that was with my old hard drive with my new one.. Could a simple connection wire been the culprit all along??? I'm open to suggestions!!!! ANY....... or should i just get over my pride and take it to someone to get fixed.
Thanks for any suggestions!!
(sorry this was so long)