PC went boom

not literally. Five minutes into playing GW (prophecies) I was greeted with the blue screen of death, from which I could not even boot into safe mode. I have only played GW for about 2 hours total (still a noob)

The PC is a Dell Dimension E520
2GB Ram
Intel Core 2 Duo 6300
256 Ati Radeon x1300 pro
Windows Vista OS
No clue on the soundcard, I believe it is integrated
Not a gaming rig for sure, but should be more than enough for GW. The game was running flawlessly at 1680 x 1050

I ran diagnostics with Dell and there was an error code with the HD. I brought the drive into work to copy my kids pics (thankfully I was able to and have saved myself the price of a divorce lawyer ). I ran a chkdsk on the drive and I find no physical errors. There was a problem with the NTFS stucture however.

Does anyone see anything above that would cause problems with running GW? I have other apps so of course it could be anything but the coincidence of having just installed GW is a little weird, I have never so much as had the PC freeze before.

Each error code was different when I would reboot the PC, I left the paper at home

The first STOP code ended in 1A (all 0's before), the next 50. As I said they are shipping me a new drive, but I am not receiving any physical errors on this one. I actually did a chdsk /f from here and it said it has corrected the problem. Now if I can just get the PC to boot, I can atempt to reinstall the drivers.

Hopefully DELL is slack and I will be able to keep this one and slave it to give me 2 x 250GB drives.

I am interested to know if there are really any issues with GW and Vista.

What really sucks is that I have been away from MMORPG for a while (previous WOW raider) and the 2 hours I have played in this game have been a blast.

/runs out at lunch to buy an external HD to backup kids pics and videos to.

WOOT! After more research, all these errors pointed to RAM even though it checked OK when I was with the Dell tech. I removed each DIMM and voila...defective RAM, PC is flying.

Maybe now I can learn how to play this damn game....

Yes it is odd, but keep this in mind. RAM is THE MOST sensative and Volatile piece of hardware. You can litterally look at it the wrong way and it will fizzle

The plot thickens...I called Dell and testing the Ram failed in one bank, but then passed in another. Putting good RAM in the bank that failed....and it passed.

Two hours of this and as it stands I know have a working PC and all my RAM, but something definatley wrong with my system.

Here's hoping it dies before feb as that is when my warranty is up. On a brighter note, got past the Searing...this game is awsome

mmm, heh.

Bad memory bay in motherboard. You can use ram in the other slot, just not this one. The motherboard may eventually die on you. Motherboards are a pain in the butt to have replaced... In most cases, you'll have to reformat, unless you want to sneak a repair in windows overtop of itself... orrrrrrrr if the motherboard went bad during warranty, Dell would be able to supply you with a replica of what you have. In this case, you'd more than likely not need to worry about reformatting.