Recently I had Atifacting and BSOD's

[Pandaz3]

on my main rig. MSI K9A2 Platinum, 6400+ Black, 2 X 2 Gig AData PC6400, MSI HD3870 Video card, 500 Gig Seagate (IDE) an optical (SATA) and floppy. I am using Vista Ultimate 64.

It would post fine with good graphics, but when booting or soon after it would give some thin and unreadable horizontal artifacts. Could not recognize a thing.

I thought it was the video card so I swapped it out with a great X1800 XT, but same old same old. I wrote in the various forums and the Vista haters claimed it to be the root of all evil.

One of the BSOD's mentioned the NFTS, so I had suspicions of the hard drive and bought a new Seagate Sata 500 Gig HDD, but have yet to install it.

Some other BSOD's mentioned the Memory and I wanted to use Memtest 86+ but it would not recognize the floppy. Finally I downloaded the ISO on another computer and made a Memtest 86+ CD (Ver 2.01)

well with both sticks in I made a full pass and logged 3,229,696 errors

I pulled one stick and got an error free full pass. I put the "Good" stick in the same slot the "bad" one had been in and got another full pass error free.

I re-installed the 3870 and it works fine. I just put The "Bad" stick in and it did post and Memtest again claimed over 3,000,000 errors

I will use the one stick till my new Ram arrives and then try to RMA the AData

[cloasters]

Wow, 4 Gb for $80. Amazing! I hope this new RAM will banish these millions of errors!

[Pandaz3]

Yes, the moral of the story is don't be to quick blame your poor innocent Video Card.

[cloasters]

Do you have a happy mosheen now? Hope so.

[Pandaz3]

I am Happy anyway, I won't have the new Ram in till this weekend (It comes Thursday and I will be gone for two days) and then I'll put the Sata 2 drive in also (I don't expect it to make a big difference but I can use the IDE elsewhere)