Last November I freshly installed Windows 2000 on my computer. It ran fine up until early this month when applications began to crash far more frequently than normal. Counter-Strike would quit with "hl.exe has generated an error" and just last week svchost.exe crashed while I was running regedit. That's a first for both of those programs.
 
It generated it's first BSOD last week with "A thread to release a resource that it did not own." And again a few days later with "IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL."
 
I reformatted and freshly installed Windows 2000 again this past weekend. It's running SP3 with all latest updates and drivers (which I'll get to in a moment). Not even a day after the install, it BSOD'd again. I wasn't sure what the exact STOP error message was, because I had forgotten to disable the "Immediately reboot" setting under the Startup and Recovery tab.
 
Here's what happened today within a timespan of about 10 minutes.
 
KMODE EXCEPTION NOT HANDLED - SAVRT.SYS
<restarted>
(Several minutes later) "An attempt was made to write to read-only memory - wdmaud.sys"
<restarted>
(This time, Windows 2000 does not even boot) CONFIG INITIALIZATION FAILED
<restarted>
(Again, Windows 2000 doesn't boot) "Your motherboard's ACPI BIOS is not fully compliant" (I didn't write down the entire message. It was about a paragraph in length.)
 
System Specs:
AMD Athlon XP 1800 w/ Coolermaster heatsink+fan
Gigabyte 7ZXE with latest BIOS (August 2002/F9) and Via 4-in-1 drivers
512 MB PC133 SDRAM (Unknown brand; purchased from www.tcwo.com)
GeForce Ti 200 64 MB (Visiontek) with latest drivers from Nvidia (December 3, 2002)
Netgear FA311 with latest drivers (1.80 or 1.90 - I forget)
AC97 onboard sound (I was using Gigabyte's drivers, but then switched over to Microsoft's, which were found on Windows Update)
 
One more thing: my computer has been locking up while I was navigating various BIOS settings today after all this started to happen. I'm really leaning towards bad motherboard/processor. Am I right?
 
Thanks,
 
--
vaporware