Power surge PC damage: How can I test all components of my PC without access to a second computer?
- by Doug T.
Ever since we had some crazy power surges last week my 64 bit Windows 7 PC has been acting strange. My USB network adapter disconnects from the wireless and can't detect the signal. I have to disable/reenable the adapter to detect it again. Also my wife has reported that the PC has rebooted a few times while I'm not sitting at it.
Today I finally caught the reboot while I was using the PC. I got this blue screen of death. Stop Code 0x00000109:
"Modification of system code or a
critical data structure was detected."
I followed the advice at the linked article and ran a memory test. I used memtest86 and its already found around 300,000 errors out of 8 gigs of ram.
Now I'm worried -- what are the odds this is isolated to just my memory and not just a system wide problem? Isn't there a good chance that many other components are fried? More importantly, how can I test those other components? Are there tools similar to memtest I can use to test my motherboard/video card/power supply? If these are vender specific, is it typical for vendors to provide testing tools?
