Last week my system (with Windows Vista 64) began to get very unstable - programs would crash, my anti-virus software became corrupted and my firewall turned itself off and wouldn't allow it to be turned on again.
Because of the latter two things, I thought it was a virus. I tried to find and clean it but couldn't find anything, and problems got worse. So I reformatted my HD and reinstalled Vista.
And had the same problems again. I thought maybe the virus had hid itself on my 1 TB second drive and I was going to have to format that too and lose all my data.
So with a heavy heart I booted from the Vista install disk - which crashed!
How could the virus infect my vista install disk. I realized the problem must be hardware related.
On an off chance I took my Q6600, which had been running at 333 FSB and it's 1.25 VID, back down Auto and 1066 FSB.
Windows install booted, and I re-installed and set everything up again.
I'd hoped it would be perfectly stable like it was before, but it isn't. Firefox crashes every 15 minutes, games crash all the time, processes get dropped. It's better than it is at 1333 FSB though. And it barely POSTS at 3.0 ghz - even with 1.325 Vcore!
My cooling is good, I have an AC Freezer 7 Pro. It was stress tested with Prime 95 and never broke 60c Tcore. It idled at 39c.
Is my CPU damaged? Or is it a virus after all? Mabye both? Shouldn't it run fine at 3.0 ghz? I live in Thailand and the electricity is sketchy - could it have been damaged by a power surge? It seems unlikely since I use a Line-interactive UPS.
What do you guys think?
Here are the rest of the system specs:
Q6600 with AC Freezer 7 Pro
ASUS P5E
2 GB (800) Corsair Valueselect, 2 GB (800) Kingston, 2x512 MB (667) Micron Technology
HD 4870
500 GB Hitachi HD
1 TB WD Caviar Black
2 DVD R/W
Tagan BZ-700w
HP w2408h LCD
Because of the latter two things, I thought it was a virus. I tried to find and clean it but couldn't find anything, and problems got worse. So I reformatted my HD and reinstalled Vista.
And had the same problems again. I thought maybe the virus had hid itself on my 1 TB second drive and I was going to have to format that too and lose all my data.
So with a heavy heart I booted from the Vista install disk - which crashed!
How could the virus infect my vista install disk. I realized the problem must be hardware related.
On an off chance I took my Q6600, which had been running at 333 FSB and it's 1.25 VID, back down Auto and 1066 FSB.
Windows install booted, and I re-installed and set everything up again.
I'd hoped it would be perfectly stable like it was before, but it isn't. Firefox crashes every 15 minutes, games crash all the time, processes get dropped. It's better than it is at 1333 FSB though. And it barely POSTS at 3.0 ghz - even with 1.325 Vcore!
My cooling is good, I have an AC Freezer 7 Pro. It was stress tested with Prime 95 and never broke 60c Tcore. It idled at 39c.
Is my CPU damaged? Or is it a virus after all? Mabye both? Shouldn't it run fine at 3.0 ghz? I live in Thailand and the electricity is sketchy - could it have been damaged by a power surge? It seems unlikely since I use a Line-interactive UPS.
What do you guys think?
Here are the rest of the system specs:
Q6600 with AC Freezer 7 Pro
ASUS P5E
2 GB (800) Corsair Valueselect, 2 GB (800) Kingston, 2x512 MB (667) Micron Technology
HD 4870
500 GB Hitachi HD
1 TB WD Caviar Black
2 DVD R/W
Tagan BZ-700w
HP w2408h LCD