Need a little advice please :)

[Jstubbs]

Well i sucessfully built my computer... It was working for about a week and a half. But then...dum.dum.dum Machine_Check_Exception(blue-screen) is appearing everytime before i enter windw. The windows load screen comes up it loades(or appears to) then the screen goes black and appears with the blue screen saying "machine_check_exception" blah blah blah ... all components were working perfectly and now this happens , i am getting rather frustrated as had just being setting the machine up, havent even got on the net, now its gona kaput. Need a little help to what may be causing this problem.

Specs
AMD athlon 64 3200+ venice
1GB(2x512) memory, generic different types. they have worked perfectly in the past.
Geforce 6600GT 256mb 128bit GFX
1x80gb WD HDD
1x40gb Barracuda HDD
Asus A8N sli delux MB

J

 

[Emperor]

does it only occur when you try and access the secondary harddrive?

it could be the IDE drivers that replace the generic windows IDE drivers that might be the cause,

could be a faulty drive.

 

[jeremy]

i looked it up on google and read various threads and the possible causes are:

1) unstable overclock
2) cpu overheating
3) bad ram,or set with too tight timings,or simply the mobo dislike it
4) unstable psu voltages
5) a bad optical drive or pci card
6) bad motherboard
7) bad cpu

if your pc is overclocked then underclock it to its stock speed and see if that helps , get into the bios and goto pc health/hardware monitoring and report back with voltages & cpu temperature , use memtest86+ to check the ram http://www.memtest.org/download/1.65/memtest86+-1.65.iso.zip (let it make at least 11 passes) , disconnect each optical drive at a time (if you got more then 1) and see how it goes , as for the 6/7 well cross that bridge when we get there. if after youll report results it will turn out its not any of 1-5 then cpu & motherboard will be the only reasons left in that case youll have to rma the motherboard and if that wont help then it must be the cpu