The BSOD Mystery Solved?

The computer that is used the most in our home started to randomly BSOD (blue screen of death) about a couple of weeks ago.  It was a Phenom 9850 with 8 gig of DDR2 and Windows 7 Pro.  I think the random crashing started to happen after a Windows update was applied.  I thought it was some video card driver or a memory error.  Suspecting the video driver, I downloaded new drivers from AMD, but that didn't help.

Today, I thought maybe the Gigabyte mainboard was flaky so I swapped it with an identical one I had with another computer running Vista Ultimate Edition 32 bit (but with a Phenom 9650 CPU and 4 gig of Kingston DDR2).

When I popped the RAM from the Phenom 9850 box to swap into the Phenom 9650, I noticed that it was 2 sticks of Corsair, 1 stick of Crucial and 1 stick of GB Micro!  Hmm....  After swapping the hard drive for the two boxes, Windows 7 wouldn't boot.  I reset the BIOS and it still wouldn't boot.  I just left the 2 Corsair sticks in there and removed the two non-matching sticks and it would POST to the BIOS. If this didn't work, I would have checked the RAM with Memtest 86+ (I was pretty sure I checked the RAM for errors previously).  I had verified that the two sticks of Kingston were good with Memtest 86+ because I had bought them used from Kijiji a few weeks ago.

Then I thought I would take the 2 sticks of Kingston in the Vista box and put it into the Windows 7 Pro box.  That way I would have 2 sticks of Corsair (800 MHz) and 2 sticks of Kingston (667 MHz) in dual channel mode (8 gig total).  I put the Crucial and GB Micro sticks in the Vista box, but as single channel.  As I type this post, the Win7 Pro computer is not BSODing.  The Vista Ultimate computer is also working.

I had to activate both computers over the phone as the processor swap caused my Windows to 'deactivate'.  On the Windows 7 Pro machine, I had to reactivate Office 2010 (over the internet).  I suspect I will have to activate Office 2007 on the Vista Ultimate computer too.

Problem solved?  I hope so.  But, I've already ordered a Haswell Core i5 4430 CPU and Asus Mainboard from NCIX.  I'll be using 16 gig of DDR3 I bought last year when RAM was dirt cheap ($30 for 8 gig!).  So, about $550 later, I'll have a significant upgrade!  I haven't been using Intel CPUs at home for a long time because I was too cheap and settled for AMD instead.  This should be a significant performance boost!

First sunflower opens

This morning, the first blossom from my Russian mammoth sunflowers appeared. I'm not sure any others will get to that stage this year, so it was great to see the recent hot weather has expedited the late starters from this year.  This one was planted further from the house in a south facing direction and that has sped up its growth.  There is one more near the house that will probably blossom any day now.  I think I'll have two that will get to be mature enough so that I can harvest the seeds for next year's crop.

On August 25th, my son found the ring that was missing since Thanksgiving 2012.  He had actually found it earlier, but discarded it because it wasn't a part for his scooter!

Albert Milne Park

I don't think we came to this nice 'digger park' last year.  A couple of years ago, I believe we also came to Digger Park on a beautiful Labour Day.  It was the same again today!  There is a digger like this at Pike Lake that my kids discovered in June 2011.  On Labour Day 2011, we were riding our bikes to Cumberland Square Mall when we discovered Albert Milne Park with its two diggers.  A fun place for boys indeed.