Strange freezing problems

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keba

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Hi
I have been working on fixing this problem for 2 months now, and I think it might be a partially broken motherboard, but I hope not.
My PC is usually on 24/7, and when I turn it off, I use the hibernate option.

Specs:
OS: WinXP home SP3 32bit
Motherboard: MSI K9VGM-V
CPU: 2,20 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core
RAM: 3GB kingston valueram
HDD: Primary ST380021A Secondary: ST3320620A
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT
PSU: 400W

Problem:
When I leave my PC on, it will freeze up. I have gotten a few BSOD's (1A, and 8E with win32k.sys). When my PC is not freezing, my music player and mouse will lag. File transfers to usb-devices is extremely slow, or completely stops. Once, when I was watching a movie, everything froze up including the PC clock, except for the seekbar and the timer on my videoplayer.

Steps I took to try to fix this:
The first thing I noticed was that both the BSOD's (0x1A and 0x8E) are memory-related, so I did a complete memory test with memtest86+ and windiag. Both tests showed that my memory is fine. Then I thought my PSU might be bad, so I found another PSU to supply my hard drives and CD-rom drives, which didn't resolve the issue. I did not have another PSU that supported my motherboard, that's why I still used the other for the motherboard. Next, I suspected that my hard drives were bad, as they are pretty old (3 years and 5 years I think), so I ran chkdsk and spinrite, which didn't solve my problem. Then I found another hard drive off the shelf, and did a clean install, which also froze eventually. That convinced me it was a hardware problem, and so I ruled out any driver issues. I tried my on-board graphics card and disconnected my external one. When I share system memory from BIOS, the PC will get green spots on the screen and crash. This is easely recreated by playing any video while using the on-board graphics card. When I disable sharing of ram, the problem is gone, but the other freezing issue still persists, so I reconnected my external graphics card. I also tried flashing my bios to the newest version, which didn't help either.
I have tried to recreate the problem by heavily abusing my CPU with 2 Super Pi's running (one for each core) but that did not make my PC crash. I do notice that µtorrent makes my video player lag alot.
EDIT: my temps are pretty low (35-36C on system). I also cleaned my case for dust as a possible solution.
Thanks for reading so far.

I would strongly appreciate any tips or suggestions that any of you might give me, as I am running out of possible solutions, short of replacing my motherboard.
 
It sounds like the mobo to me, since it seems you tried practically everything else.

I was afraid of that, and the timing couldn't have been worse. I was hoping to spend my summer vacation gaming, but I guess I will be earning a new motherboard instead :)

Based on the problem described above, the 1A Memory Management and the 8E, does anyone know what specific part on the motherboard is damaged? Is it possible to disable one of the two cores on my CPU to see if one of them is damaged?

Keba
 
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