power outage screwed PC, couldn't boot windows, now bad ram?

[kisada]

Power outage today. Killed my ability to boot into windows (7). Usually when i get a power outage, i have to do a bit of restarting to get it to work properly, but it's not typically an issue.

This time, though, my PC would straight shut down the moment windows tried to boot and the progress bar moved. I was able to boot into safe mode though, but for some crazy reason my system restore was set to off, so that was not an option.

I tried setting my bios to defaults (not that i changed much to begin with) and that didn't help (though that was more due to me being unable to activate the right boot drive). Restored the settings to whatever i was using before.

Air cleaned it out and PC didn't even bother starting after that. Got a temp PSU to troubleshoot and everything actually started working again, kinda...


now? I magically only have half the ram I had before (32 > 16). While in the bios, i also saw that my two slots said they had 8g each. I figured if i had bad ram i'd have just a single stick of 16 showing and the other empty. But no, both 8. I also have a strange message upon booting the PC, with something about a mac address, which i can post about in more detail later.

And naturally, with just 16g of ram, doing shit while in windows is pretty slow. To compound things, i loaded up ffxiv to see how slow it would be, and while it seemed perfectly fine, my PSU's fan started going HAM before i closed the game.


Soooo, yeah, any ideas or thoughts? Also, some other notes:

- windows 7, intel i7-3770k, 3.5ghz. i believe it's all stock settings but my friend built the pc so he might have tinkered with that. i would bet also that he definitely optimized the ram settings, but other than reloading whatever bios settings i was using before the crash, i didn't touch a damn thing.

- i pulled out my second vid card for the time being. my previous PSU was 850w, and this current one is 550.

- for a long while now i've had the infamous "display driver has stopped working" screen crash. usually would happen when opening certain youtube vids or vines. i don't know if this is related to the PSU or maybe signs of it going bad, but just throwing it out there.



Would appreciate any help. I can look up/screenshot/provide details of whatever else if necessary. Thanks

[Shenrien]

Did your beep code when going through the POST change at all?

For the issue with your RAM, an easy way to test your sticks without having to run memtest86 which might not even work if the board isn't recognizing all your RAM in the first place. But the way you do it, is to pull all the sticks out, plug one in one slot, boot up, see that the PC recognizes it, and then shut down, and move it down the row. Repeat until you cover all rows with all sticks, if the PC is recognizing all 4 sticks of your RAM then that is one less thing to worry about.

If you have a slot or two that are not being recognized entirely when you move a stick of ram into it, the most likely cause is there was a short and it killed the slot and it's time for a new board sadly.

As for your PSU going ham when loading up XIV, mine does that(CORSAIR HX Series HX850 850W) which is fairly normal for a PSU to rev up when it has to pump out a bit more power, perhaps you never noticed until now and it's just over thinking somethings because you're concerned about the hardware.

For the display driver stopped working, idk it happens to myself as well when playing youtube vids, or I have gifs up. But things like twitch and what not have yet to crash them when watching or streaming, so yeah shits random yo.

[kisada]

thanks for the response.

I replaced the PSU and everything seems to be in working order. Seems like the temp PSU being weak-ish is what also caused it to run at a high level. I stuck in the new one and put my two cards back in and it's quite silent. Also some retardation on my part, apparently the sticks were in fact 8g each. I just automatically assumed there was no way i built a PC with only 16g in it (been virtually forever since i looked at my specs). But i told someone about the specs, he looked it up, i looked it up and lo and behold they are just two 8g sticks. And i believe it since they are pretty expensive even after a couple years of use.

I suppose only thing i have to worry about now is the dumb display driver crashing.

[Niya]

Yeah, 8gig modules are still pretty pricy. But 16gig total should be completely fine, I mean, the usual rule of thumb is:
4-8gig fine for pretty much anyone
16gig+ only if you use ram-heavy stuff like editing videos or working with HUGE images in photoshop.

From my personal experience, for gaming rigs 8gig is fine, 16gig perfect.

And about the crashing driver, it's hard to find the actual cause... Our static paladin has random driver crashes, mostly during raids (kinda meh when you're bashing Twintania in dreadknight phase and she shouts "driver crash, black screen!"...)
What you could try is completely uninstalling the driver and doing a fresh install after reboot. Though, this clean uninstall is the tricky part. There are always leftovers from the uninstall routine, and the uninstall/cleanup utils from AMD, nVidia and Intel might go a bit overboard... Tried one of them on my laptop once (hybrid graphics with Intel IGP and AMD chip), and the cleanup tool removed the graphics driver plus a few vital system drivers... Luckily system restore worked...
What might work a bit better are 3rd party tools like driver fusion. Uninstall the driver, reboot (into safe mode maybe), let DF run over it, reboot again and install the driver fresh.