Bad motherboard or cpu?

[plasmeh]

I have been having trouble with my computer as of late. Hope someone here can help.

- Computer randomly gives me the blue memory dump screen.

- Figured it might have been some bad ram, replaced with new ram, does the same thing still.

- Figured a new hard drive couldn't hurt, and a fresh install of Vista may help. It didn't. Same symptoms.

- I know the video cards and sound card are fine, and generally don't have anything to do with this sort of thing. The last two things I think it can be is a bad motherboard (I've had it happen before) or a bad processor. I don't think it's the processor (doesn't crash under load). With my old bad motherboard, I experienced random lockups, random blue screens, and it wouldn't boot sometimes, same thing this does.

- Last thing, I've noticed when I go to install a new program sometimes, it will blue screen. Or if I open up the dvd drive, at that exact moment it will blue screen, but only sometimes. Motherboard or something else?
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[shortstuff_mt]

Did you test the old or new RAM? Memtest86+ is pretty good at finding RAM errors. Posting the complete computer specs will help a lot. Did you manually set the RAM speed/timings/voltage to the manufacturers specs in the BIOS when you got the new RAM? BSOD's are often caused by RAM problems.

I agree that it could be the motherboard, but I would manually set the RAM settings and run memtest86+ overnight before you rule out the RAM as the cause. It is possible that the new RAM is faulty.