So I’ve been having computer problems, and today, in a stroke of blindingly obvious inspiration, fixed them. The problems were very strange – manifesting as random crashes, random freezes, all clearly attributable to mysterious hardware problems. Sometimes they seemed like video problems, other times they seemed like sound card issues. Occasionally I was certain that it was the hard drive. I had deduced this morning, after a 24-hour run of memtest86, that it was the RAM, and even got an RMA to send it back to newegg. Then I had one last idea, which came to me while I was factoring the coefficients of a cubic equation.
I run an Athlon 2400+/M (mobile) designed for overclocking, but I’ve been running it at stock speed, 1.8 GHz. Because Athlon serial numbers and speeds aren’t really correlated (there’s a mild linear relationship) I decided to double-check what the stock multiplier is.
The stock speed is 133 x 14. Sure enough, I’d been running it at 150 x 12 – inadvertently overclocking my motherboard (and on-board sound card, and RAM…) and under-stressing my CPU. I’ve gone back and successfully run all of the programs that had exhibited wonky behavior. I am now running stable at 1.667 GHz (my motherboard only supports multipliers up to 12.5x) and happy as a pig in mud.
Just thought I’d throw that out there for posterity’s sake.