Fascinating crash behaviour

[resonator]

I'm running WinXP, my machine's specs are:

- AthlonXP 1,33 GHz (I believe that would be called 1500+)
- MSI Board with a KT266
- 512 meg 266 DDR RAM
- ATI AllinWonder 128pro AGP Graphics Board
- Terratec EWS MT88 Soundcard
- Noname LAN-Board

I've been running CCE for months, first 2.5, then 2.66, and a few days ago CCE started to crash. So I read like a dozen or some threads here and tried a lot of things (f.e. downgrading AviSynth, using a temporary AVI-file, ...) but nothing worked and CCE continued to crash. So I figured it had to be a hardware failure like bad RAMs or something and I tried to run the RAM at 133Mhz. Still crashes. So I tried to lower the FSB-frequency from 133 to 100 MHz, and there we go, CCE is encoding again, actually it does right now as I'm writing this.

I'm wondering, does anybody happen to know why it would work at 1 GHz and not with 1,33 Ghz? Is my CPU fading away? Any hardware experts with an expertise?

Btw, the error message WindowsXP SOMETIMES gave me was "IRQL_NOT_EQUAL_OR_LESS", sometime I just got a non-identified error message.

[EDIT: Just corrected a few flaws in terms of orthography.]

[auenf]

sounds like memory problems.

grab a little testing app called memtest86, run it and if theres errors, lower your memory timings till it passes all the way thru.

Enf...

[resonator]

Thanks for the advice, but after running this little app (4 passes) I can say it's definatly not the memory.

I'm gonna try a new and clean setup of Windows next.

[SVCD4Me]

Did you run the memtest with 100 fsb or 133 fsb? It sure sounds like a memory problem.
Do you have any other bios tweaks or advanced settings like fast CPU command decode or aggressive ram timings?

[resonator]

I ran the test with the FSB @ 133Mhz respectively RAM @ 266MHz, which shouldn't be a problem. I've left the RAM timing at BIOS Fail-Safe defaults, I just switched the USB Controller back on, but left everything else unchanged.

However, I recognized that this problem seems to affect other programs like WinRAR too. I checked several archives with the complying PAR-files and though all files are OK accoring to SmartPAR, WinRAR gives me a CRC error. Could this also be memory related?

I'd really love to find out what part of my computer is dying here, since I can only afford to change one side of the CPU/Mainboard/RAM triangle at the moment.