I've posted a few questions and rants on here about some problems I've had with my HTPC and I finally solved them. It would give random BSODs (at least once every 2-3 days), mostly related to memory management but sometimes various drivers. The machine would also never reboot by itself - using either a hard or soft reboot would cause it to just turn off. Powering on for the first time always failed and resulted in the machine powering off by itself. Pushing the power button again and it booted up fine. And occasionally during boot it would BSOD with a driver failure. Rebooting a couple times would usually work fine.
The problem was the RAM, sort of. When I first saw the memory-related BSODs, I had tested the heck out of the ram (2 1 GB sticks of Geil DDR2 800) using memtest86 and they passed with flying colors, except for a couple of times when memtest would crash. The issue was that the RAM was incompatible with the mobo (Gigabyte DS3H with 780G chipset). And here's the kicker - it was listed on the manufacturer's RAM compatibility list. I had decided that it was either the mobo or RAM and after flipping a coin decided to buy new RAM. I was reading through the Newegg reviews of the mobo, saw someone else had RAM compatibility issues and that Gigabyte tech support had suggested this stuff: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134582 Works great now, and so far (knock on wood) all those issues have gone away. ------------- Brian
