Unknown hardware problem in Asus G1S

Hi,

I bought an Asus G1S last week, and have been having regular problems. To resolve, I reinstalled Vista from the recovery dvd, but when i tried installing the drivers after that, the install always failed, and Vista would get stuck at the welcome screen. Thereafter, I installed the OS and loaded my drivers manually from the driver dvd.
I still have problems with Vista crashing and giving errors like, application failed to initialize, application accessed wrong memory location, services go dead while running, windows explorer and ie explorer keep crashing, and bsods.
Now, Vista suddedly is showing up a new hardware it didn't show earlier in device manager, and is unable to find its drivers either online, or in the asus driver dvd. Since Vista gives me no info as to what that hardware is, (its listed under others), I cant search for the drivers on net. All my other standard hardware (LAN, video, Btooth, wireless etc). are already listed properly, and have drivers installed for them. By the way, the audio drivers in the asus dvd never installed properly, but I dont think that this is an audio driver problem, as my inbuilt speakers work.
I think this started after I created a virtual drive on my system, but I'm not sure. Has anybody come across something like this before? I would really appreciate some help on this. My system is in a mess right now, and I hate it, as i've spent a fortune on it.

Thanks.

 

I would also like to add that I tried doing a RAM test to check if my memory was ok. So first I started with the Vista Memory Diagnostics utility, and chose the extended scan. But no matter how many times I tried, it always got stuck exactly at 21%. Stuck means freezes. No errors or anything else. Does this sound like a RAM problem, or more to do with Vista?
Anyway, I then did a MemTest+ scan. The standard scan went well with everything ok for all the tests/multiple passes. Then I went into the options for bios (option 5 or 6 in configuration in memtest+).
The standard bios test went well again, but when I selected 'bios -all' option (option 2 inside that), memtest gave me erros on all passes, and it froze too. (refused to exit with ESC). I dont knwo if this is again a problem with my RAM or the utility, or else if i'm doing anything wrong. Also, I have 3Gb of RAM installed, and this particular bios test which failed showed some numbers like 4096 in the range.
Hope somebody can give me some pointers to doing this thing properly.
Thanks.

 

Looks like my problems are solved... hopefully. I reseated my RAM module (it was seated pretty nicely when i took it out, but I reseated them anyway).
Then I borrowed a Vista Home Premium cd from my friend (not an ASUS recovery disk, the full install disk), and first ran Windows memory diagnostic, which now completed successfully even for extended test mode.
Then I went into Windows repair, and immediately it told me that there were startup problems in my current vista install, and if i wanted that fixed. Obviously I did, and once i restarted my PC, it booted normally and for the short period of 6 hrs, it hasn't given me any of the above problems that I mentioned earlier. I need to observe it longer, but it looks positive from here.

Moral of the story: Do not depend on your ASUS recovery disk to solve all problems, also as it does not have a repair option, you have to do a fresh install every time, which is very painful. There may be startup problems that need to get fixed, but never do through a recovery dvd.
I suppose it is only fair that a recovery dvd should have atleast these features. After all, we pay for the OS even if its an OEM version. MS should do something about this.

By the way, the unknown hardware detected issue still exists, but since it isnt giving me any problems as of now, and i cant detect what is hardware functionality is missing, i'm just going to leave it like that for the moment.

 

Good job, debug13.