Remember when I mentioned that I was slowly kinda making my computer a semi-decent gaming rig? Well, the other night I was welcomed to a blue screen.
...damn...
I figured something happened to the OS (deleted something wrong, bad driver install, etc), so I ended up killing the drive and trying to reinstall Windows.
I first installed Windows 7. It installed ok, but then immediately blue screened on me.
I then tried Windows 10, and it blue screened on me during the installation!
Tried a few Linux distros, both worked, but neither one detected my USB Wi-Fi thing.
This was all in one evening. I kinda gave up and tried the following night. A co-worker of mine mentioned that the hard drive might be going out, and I have had several do that to me before. I've also had capacitors burst in some computers causing failures.
That night, I started up my computer again with the intention to try the Linux distro. I noticed that when I tried to load the distro, there was some kind of failure warning that I couldn't figure out. Again, the distro didn't find my wifi thing, so I gave up and tried to reinstall Windows...again.
I noticed, this time, that there is a system diagnostics option that I can do at boot time. Running this gave me an error...not on the hard drive, but on the memory test.
!?!
I opened up the case to remove one of the sticks and see if it was one, the other, or both that were failing, also checking for bad caps while I was in there (there was none). I took one memory stick out and ran the test. First test gave me the error. I ran it again, and it gave me another error.
I swapped out the sticks and ran the test. This time it didn't give me errors. Ran it again to make sure, no error.
So, just because I didn't want to go back to running 4GB RAM again, I put one of the old 2GB sticks in and ran the test, which worked perfectly. It's not the 8GB I had, but I'll take 6GB.
With that done, I just need to get everything reinstalled on my computer...ugh...
