Recently my PC's been fritzing out all over the place; so I figured I'd check drivers first. Went and updated all drivers except two which I have no idea what they're about and where to get the drivers.

PC's still flagging so I figure it has to be these two;

IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers:
- Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller

System Devices:
- ATK0110 ACPI Utility

Any help would be appreciated.

Cheers.

 

That one is your hard drive controller. If it's flagged in Windows' Device Manager, there's something wrong with your motherboard. Or Windows...But we all know there's something wrong with Windows.

Here's what Google says:
http://www.motherboardpoint.com/atk0110-acpi-utility-t22012.html

TL;DR:

Fuck Winblows, get Linux.

 

Running Windows XP 32bit.

Been thinking about it. Just waitin' till I get my hands on a spare harddrive before I do so.

EDIT: In further description of how it 'fritzes' is that whether I'm playin' games or not; sometimes my pc crashes. The screen turns into the background colour of whatever I'm running on the top side and black on the bottom side; splitting the screen horizontally. It happens like once a day now; where as when I had just updated most of my drivers, everything was fine. And when I'm playing a game like Fallout 3; heavy on graphics, sometimes the colours get all inverted; pretty sure wasteland desert isn't supposed to be pink and white. Or it just straight up crashes into the split screen.

 

Sounds like your video drivers are conflicting with something else to me.

 

This fault could really be anything, but a crummy video card, ram or power supply would be likely culprits. They can be very hard faults to diagnose without swapping them out for known good components. I don't think that updating your drivers is going to help.

You need to narrow your problem down.

1. You could re-format. If a re-format doesn't fix it (or if your PC still crashes in Linux/other Windows install) then it's definitely a hardware problem and you should focus on that side of things.

2. If you can grab another working computer then try swapping parts out until you can determine which one's causing your PC to crash.

3. You can also try to narrow it down by stressing different parts of your system to intentionally make them fail. You can stress test your system (cpu/ram) with Super Pi and your video card with ATI Tool (it works for both nVidia and ATI). Don't bother using Fallout 3 as a test to see if your PC is stable. I love FO3, but it crashes like a clubber on Monday morning. GTA IV is even worse.

4. Testing a PSU is more difficult. Nothing makes a PSU fall over faster than having to spin up a bunch of hard drives simultaneously at boot time. That's not exactly a surefire diagnosis though. You're better off swapping it out for a good one. A recently well-reviewed one from the likes of Tom's Hardware, Anandtech, or [H]ard|OCP is your best bet. PSU quality can be very deceptive and I'd have almost no way of knowing a bad model from a good one without hardware-focussed sites testing it first. Manufacturers lie to you. The sticker ratings on the PSUs lie to you. And brand names are no protection. Often PSUs come from a single manufacturer and are just re-badged by a number of different brands as their own. I've gone through a few. <_<

Nothing kills a PSU faster than dirty power (brown outs, frequent black outs, power spikes).