Summer of 2003 I saved the cash to build a sweet little high school graduation present for myself.
(My Computers stats)
It has a 17" flat screen, a basic 30-watt ATX case, an intel desktop boar D845PEBT2, 1 stick of Ultra 512mb SDRam and another stick of 512mb SDRam that i have no idea what company it comes from, Radeon 98000 Pro graphics card, Sound Blaster Extigy external sound card, a wireless mouse and keyboard by logitech, 5.1 surround sound speakers by Creative, an Imitation floppy drive, a Pioneer DVD-ROM drive and a DVD/rw drive (so i can burn cds and dvds), a processor fan by intel, a seagate barracuda with 120 gigs on it with an ATA connection and a pentium 4 with 2.8 gigahertz, a robotics 56k internal modem (because i don't have any way to get a cable connection where i live), and a LAN card just in case.
(Background information to the Problem)
The problem started out with the ram, see I didn't want to force it in so I took it to a friend and he put it in with a little more force then I could bare. So I got that problem out of the way, now to do the basic BIOS stuff and installing an OS, my friend just so happens to have a FREE copy of Windows 2000 Pro lying around(only catch is it was downloaded off of Kazaa, but it shouldn't screw anything up, right?). I format the hard drive and install windows 2k pro, the next day I am falling in love with my computer so I install all the windows upgrades and all the drivers that came with the misc. hardware, I even go as far as to the sites to check to see if I have the latest drivers, if I don't I download and install them. Two days later I am at a LAN party and my computer gets a runtime error for Warcraft 3, I think nothing of it because 2k Pro is a picky like that only problem is when I am playing the game it gives me a run time error almost every 15 seconds of game play, but this one time it gives me a Stop error (you know with the damn blue screen), i keep restarting hoping it will fix itself, but to no avail. Next day i go to Staples to buy Windows 2k Pro full version and Windows XP Pro upgrade version. I delete the partioned drive and re-install 2k Pro then I upgrade to Xp pro. Now we are in september and I am in college, I keep getting these damn stop error messages and I have checked to make sure all the hardware and software is installed properly. So i figure it must be a faulty hard drive, i buy a seagate barracuda with an SATA connection and 120 gigs i install that and its driver and i get a friend to download windows XP Pro full version off of kazaa for me, now I can't install XP Pro, and when I go back to the orginal hard drive it is still has those damn stop errors, occasionally it works but only for a few hours at a time and them it goes back to the run time errors.
the stop error message is:
***Stop: 0x0000008E (0xC0000005, 0x80866024, 0xF7CB5EEC, 0x00000000)
I guess what I am asking for is any advice on whether i need to buy something else or what i can do to fix this problem, sorry for such a long post I just wanted to be as informative as possible. If you help me fix this problem, I will get my mom(who makes the best chocolate-chip cookies in the world) to make you some cookies.