1er

My Full PC Specifications

I've been having odd freezes in games / graphics drivers failing for various reasons (regardless of driver version).

I'm about to install the newest chipset drivers I could find for the chipset I have, as a last resort. None of my RAM is faulty and the only thing I can put it down to is chipset now.

Could the restrictive 8x PCI-E for Graphics cause freezes and failures?






P.S. I am buying a new machine soon, but have been putting up with this pain-in-the-backside machine for a while now.

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Nagin

I noticed in your list you have two different types of memory installed.

Couple of thoughts:

Do you have the sticks in the right slots for dual channel memory usage if your board supports it? I know for most boards I have seen you put duplicate sticks in alternate slots, like 1 and 3 and 2 and 4. Mine are colored differently to emphasize this.

Have you tried just one set of memory to see if it is stable with one type of memory? Put them in the correct dual slots or just use 1GB.

Are you letting the BIOS autoset the speed and timings and do they match the specs for the sticks?

Just fyi.

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msdz

Yeah, I am sure swapping the memory around to 1&3 and 2&4 having the same memory would help a little but also doing simple cleaning of the computer such as defrag, disk cleanup or running Ccleaner, checking for virus's, Trojans, malware, and adware may help improve the performance of the computer.
I am pretty ritual at cleaning my computer, I can notice slight performance drops if I let mine go a few days without doing a clean up, I don't always defrag to often but having PerfectDisk also helps so I don't need to do a manual defrag so much.
I am sure it is something simple such as maintenance that may help, of course swapping the memory into the proper slots if it has dual channel memory if the MB supports it will help as well.

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1er

Well, my RAM slots are coloured differently, but there is no information on what it means, this is some Acer motherboard that came with the original machine.

I've tried using matched RAM and the problems persist.
The freezes only happen in 3D accelerated games (and sometimes when I'm not looking it will freeze at the desktop just after booting, but very rarely) like Counterstrike Source, the display will lock and I hear a sound loop. At this stage I usually bash CTRL+ALT+DEL and sometimes it dumps me to the desktop where the graphics drivers have crashed and a reboot is necessary.

I can also assure you that my cooling is very much sufficient. I'm pretty sure the RAM is okay, but I will look into that further.

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Acreo Aeneas

Are you using a nVidia graphics card?

If it's a 8800GT or a 9800xx, try the 175.12 beta drivers on nVidia's website. They solved the graphics driver crashes and random game lockups for me (except the ones in 2142).

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msdz

Different colored slots mean the the same memory type(same company) goes into the same colored slots. This is what is called dual channel memory and I am sure your MB supports it since the slots are colored differently.
Try taking the memory from slot 1 and putting it in slot 4 and the memory that came out of slot 4 goes into 1. this should be setting it up as dual channel, most of the time the BIOS may not even need to be fooled with but some do need to be set for dual channel memory in the BIOS. try this and see if it may help any.

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Nagin

I don't know if you can find out what the memory specification is for your machine/motherboard but that might lead you somewhere productive at least in finding out that your mixed speed memory sticks might be expected to run ok.

I google Acer T180 and seem to find a lot of references to DDR2 4200 memory being the standard. Did you add new memory to your original purchase?

You mentioned you tried a matched set of RAM it didn't help. Does that mean you took the 2 4200 sticks and placed them in the machine for a test for awhile? Certainly could be other issues as mentioned with drivers etc., but memory incompatibilities cause all types of lockups.

If it was my machine I'd try 1 stick in slot 1 of the 4200 RAM and see if that makes a difference - or maybe the 2 sticks in slots 1 and 3.

BTW, does your PC has an internal speaker that send beep codes on bootup? Usually if it does, 1 beep means it passed the POST and at least will run the memory, but I know from my experience it doesn't mean it will games without lockups.

I noticed in your summary a memory clock speed that nearly matches the 4200 RAM. Sometimes the BIOS will automatically scale back the memory speed to match the lowest ones, but certainly not all BIOS have that ability. Again, it is better never to mix memory types unless you know your system can adapt to that situation.

A long shot idea but can ACER support advise you what type of memory is the recommended?

Maybe you will get lucky with a vid driver change - I know I played around with the latest nVidia drivers for my newest build and finally concluded my mem was just not playing well with my motherboard.

Just a couple of additional ideas fyi.

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1er

That was very very useful, thank you.

I will try the graphics drivers first, and then I will try removing the extra RAM I added, leaving only the original RAM.

Problem is, these freezes only happen occasionally so it will take a while to find out if it worked. Just had a freeze btw.

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