Access Violation??

[Akolite]

While trying 2 divX a movie using Vdub it randomly crashes telling me that there has been an access violation. Sometimes it dosent crash on the snaller jobs, but any job longer than about half an hour seems to give the same problem.
I am running windows xp service pack 1, AMD Athlon XP 2000+ with 256 DDR.
It was suggested 2 me that it could be a problem with CPU voltages.
Any ideas people?

[alexnoe]

Run Prime95 and MemTest, each at least for 6 hours.

[Akolite]

Excuse my ignorance, but what are those programs for?

[alexnoe]

Prime95:

This program can either be used to participate in the search for large prime numbers, or it can be run in "torture" mode. Then, it verifies already known results on your machine to see if all calculations are done correctly.
I personnally considered my new P4 2400 @ 2900 stable after this problem did not find an error within 11 hours.
On instable machines, Prime95 usually finds errors, if the instability is caused by hardware (not drivers)

MemTest:

Runs a systematic stress test on your memory. It will write different patterns into every byte of your memory, with cache/ecc on and off etc. One complete pass takes several hours if you have lots of memory, at least 3 passes are recommended.
If your memory has any defect (which would cause random access violations, bsods, freezes, corrupted data and the such), this program is likely to find it.

Both of them can easily be found with google.

[Akolite]

The only version of prime95 that i found, asks me 2 connect 2 the net. Now this is a problem because I dont have a net connection at home, where my pc is.

[alexnoe]

The torture test should not attempt to connect to the internet.

On startup, the program indeed tries to, and fails, but that should not be a problem if you only want to run the torture test.