The problem of crash freezes persisted in apps outside of Vegas.

The 650watt PSU made no difference at all. An ATI graphics card made no difference either.
The trouble is it's a friend's computer who has nil experience in running them.
I've got it back here and I've upgradeded the bios and am running at fail-safe bios settings.

I'll double the ram to 6gb - no idea if Windows XP Pro 32bit will see any extra ram at all.

If I can see any instabilty in windows, I'll see if MSI can help - it's an X58 Pro board.

William,

I wish I had read your posts earlier...

The problems you describe could be hardware related but don't leave out the software... A few suggestions..

- The i7 runs hot and the signs you describe may be heat related, particularly if the problems occur after the system has been running for awhile during high intensity work. Go to download hardware monitor: CPUID Run that program and take a look at your system temps while idle, and also under load.

- All 32-bit OS's (Xp, Vista, etc) will only see a maximum of just under 4Gb of memory on a computer.

- Not all power supplies are created equally. I happen to run the same Corsair 520 watt PS in my i7 system and I've not had a single freeze/crash since I built the system. I'm also running it at 3.0Ghz as well. That's a good unit. If you're running something like Jeff, you definately need more power, but the vast majority of systems are fine on 450-550 watts of power with a good PS.

- You're a prime candidate for a format and reinstall. If you can verify that your CPU is not overheating, and you believe your RAM is ok. Then sometimes you just need to wipe the slate clean and start over. Why not go for Windows 7 64-bit? All reports are this OS will be extremely stable and fast. I'm running the RC version on one of my computers and I'm impressed.

Jon

I had the same problem with a Xeon Processor where the whole thing just kept freezing. It turned out to be a loose CPU Fan. Amazing the trouble that caused!

I ran Prime95 and it ran fine until a windows update restarted the computer overnight, after over 12 hours of success. Windows update is now disabled!!

I tried to render the 5 minute HDV and AVCHD files into a 5 minute movie, and it crashed after 95% of the movie, citing a problem of low virtual memory - so I've increased that to 4000mb from 2000mb.

The 3x2gb memory turned up, so that's in - and now it has completed a few versions of AVCHD movie clips, with a range of transitions in between each clip - and not crashed since.

So I take it the problem has been down to lack of memory or virtual memory.

I'll get it through a 24 hour spell of Prime95 anyhow and knock out some longer movies, but it now appears stable and working.

Thanks everybody.

Check Heatsink
 

I had a similar problem. The fan was not loose but I only had a bit of the heat transfer gel on the cpu heatsink. For the first 2 weeks after I built my i7 920 it was crashing almost daily.

I bought really good heat transfer gel and upgraded my cpu fan. Very few problems with crashing since then. I have 6gb of Ram, this is just enough for Vegas 9 64 to edit AVCHD in real time, but even so I sometimes have a bit of lag sync issues when a preview clip starts playing. Very few other problems. At some point I will upgrade to 12 gb of RAM which should be plenty. In my experience 9 64 works much better than either 8 or 9/32 in terms of both speed and crashing. I believe that a 32 bit system doesn't utilize more than 3 gb of RAM, or is it 6. Someone else can comment on that.

It's 3GB, and only 2 or so of that for programs without some trickery.