Trouble Shooting my Vista 64 Installation

God Dammit. We'll I decided I was going to give Windows Vista 64 a spin since I have 4 gigs of memory installed in this beast. At first I really liked it. I have been running it for nearly a month now... unfortunately I have developed... some how shall we say... aggravating glitches lately that make me a very sad... and rabid... panda.

So I've been using the performance and reliability monitor built into vista to chase down my software problems... because all of my glitches are software related and all of the software that's glitching are games... good games... games that are supposed to be 64 bit compatible... that what the "Games for Windows" tag line on the box is supposed to mean... automatic support for 64 bit Operating Systems.

So anyhow my problem started with Fallout 3. It runs excellent on my system... as long as it runs for... normally anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours before it crashes to the desktop. The crashes don't break the game and make it unplayable... I just don't like having to save every five minutes out of fear that god is going to smite me.

Well I have tons of experience dealing with computer related issues both hardware and software and I have learned from experience that i should take a couple of days and think about what Ive done that could potentially be causing problems. I also hit the forums and start looking at what other people have done to make it more stable.

I found that there is a problem with Fallout 3 and the FFD decoders that are included in the K-Lite Codec package. So I went in and configured the parameters so that FFD wouldn't run while Fallout was running. That helped but it really didn't completely solve the problem.

So after thinking about it for a couple of days and using the system health monitor to keep track of crashes and software failures I decided to set my BIOS to the system defaults and see if that helps stabilize Windows Vista and its related software.

Ive been running an overclocked configuration for months... but the overclock is a tad on the ridiculous side (2 ghz dual core overclocked to 3 with a voltage bump from 1.34 volts to 1.44 volts, and memory overclocked from 800 to 1066mhz with a voltage bump from 1.8 to 2.1 volts). I'll check back and let everyone who reads this (thanks mom) how I make out with my default settings and if that solves any problems.

Crist I hate my rotten luck. Later.