First gaming PC, having some issues

ShinyRedKnight

So about a year ago I got my first full gaming PC which was also my first time building a PC. It works fine and has been giving me the gaming performance I expected. However, some annoying issues have reared their ugly heads. I'm choosing to address these now as such issues seem to have grown lately. But before that, here are my specs for reference.

ASUS Rampage Formula mobo

core 2 duo e6850 @ 3.0 ghz (not oced)

geforce 9800 gtx 512 mb

2 gb ram (I'm thinking these may be the issue, they came with the mobo and seem to be a no name brand... never heard of 'wizard' ram)

corsair 750 watt psu

Windows 7 32 bit

Originally, I had just issues with freezing during times when multiple programs were running, so I suspected ram. However, two issues in addition to these have come up. First Windows, after turning the PC on, asked to check the consistency of my harddisk. After that, I had two blue screens, about 2-3 weeks apart from each other. And today Windows asked to check the consistency again. Now, to me these issues seem big. However, other than these handful of events, my PC runs great with games, internet, and other programs.

Any idea what's happening? I'm overly paranoid about this as it is my first and only gaming computer. Thanks a ton for any advice, I'm still a newb to this.

Sirson

Sounds like your computer is ok a blue screen every few weeks is probably software related. If it was something major like your Ram, your computer would have trouble posting and even booting to windows. 2 gigs sounds like a low ammount though, if I was you I would kick it to at least 4 with Windows 7, Ram is super cheap these days.

TychoCelchuuu

Sounds like your hard drive is failing? Run chkdsk on it.

Daemas

like TychoCCelchuuu said before me, run Chkdsk. If that turns up ok. Try some RAM from a reputable company.

any of this stuff will do great

TychoCelchuuu

Before you buy more RAM or new RAM, run memtest on each stick individually. But chkdsk first.

ShinyRedKnight

Did the chkdsk and all seems okay. How do I run memtest? And thanks for the awesome help all!

cliffski

it can be worth physically removing the RAM and 're-seating' it (just stick it back in). Sometimes you get micro pieces of dirt or grit or whatever on some of the connectors and it can cause rare, random memory issues.
It's something that is quick and easy and free, so worth doing.
When I worked on hardware, we had little brushes that we would use to clean the gold connectors on DIMMS, to ensure they didn't have any oil on them from fingers, but that was stockmarket PC's and they were a bit paranoid

TychoCelchuuu

With memtest you just burn an iso of it or get a bootable .exe for a USB key and run it at boot (you might need to go into your BIOS and set your CD drive to be above your hard drive in the boot order). Run it on one stick at a time because it'll sometimes choke on large amounts of RAM and because you'll probably have to do that anyways if it finds any errors.