I just recently built a new computer and installed Windows Vista Ultimate X64 on it. I've been frequently getting BSOD's, mostly related to win32k.sys . This seems to only happen when I'm overclocking my computer, but when I'm not it runs very smoothly , like now. My hardware specs are: Intel Core 2 Duo E4500, ASRock 4CoreDual SATA2, XFX nVidia GeForce 8600GT Overclocked XXX Edition, Seagate 260 GB SATAII Hard Drive, DVD RAM Internal & External, Dell CD Burner Internal, 500W Ultra X Connect Power supply. I'm guessing that these crashes have to do with overclocking? If not why do I keep getting these BSOD's and how can I fix this?

Thanks,
n0data

UPDATE: The screens are gone. But now when I'm off overclock, whenever It's on for more than 15 minutes it completely locks up and i have to shut it down from the power supply. I'm going to try a reinstall and I'll let you know what happens.

Thanks,
n0data.

First try looking in the Reliability Monitor. Go to Start and type in "perfom" (without the quotes) and press Enter. Click on the Reliability Monitor in the left hand pane and then look for the errors in the right hand pane.

Next, try looking at a System Health Report. Go to Start and type in "perfmon /report" (without the quotes) and press Enter. It'll take about a minute for the report to generate. Then look at Warnings, Performance, and any other errors that may be displayed.

Finally, look at the Event Viewer for errors. Go to Start and type in "eventvwr" (without the quotes) and press Enter. Click on Windows Logs in the left hand pane, then on System logs and view the log in the right hand pane. Do the same thing for the Application log files.

Let us know what errors are found and we can work from there.

I'm going to try that in a moment, thank you! Also, I did reinstall and the crashing is *finally* gone and I don't know about the win32k.sys, because I haven't overclocked yet but I am about to. I'll let you know what happens.

Thanks,
n0data

OK. I ran the reliability performance monitor and the only thing the report detected wrong was i have no printer driver for my lexmark. But i did see, before the test, the cpu is at maximum frequency? Does this mean I'm unable to overclock more than what I'm at now? (2.9GHz with a FSB of 263MHz). Last time I overclocked I could boot the operating system at 270 FSB, and at the minimum 265. So basically am I at my limit? Also, when I overclocked to 265MHz FSB a minute ago, it booted but I then got an error "DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL" and at the bottom it showed ecache.sys. Why do I get this one now when I overclock?

Thanks,
n0data