BSOD

  • Thread starter Thread starter The Devil's Advocaat
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The Devil's Advocaat

I'm getting regular crashes to the BSOD - around 1 an hour. It doesn't seem
to matter what I'm doing: the latest crash was while running 3DMark03 but
it's happened in COD, X2:The Threat, America's Army..... The list goes on.

Once or twice the blue screen has shown specific dlls (usually NVidia or
USB-related) but this time no driver is mentioned. The STOP message is:

0x0000000A (0x00000004, 0x00000002, 0x00000001,0x804FA364).

I'm running XP Home on a Mesh 3200+ (no overclocking) with an FX5900 Utra.

Can anyone help? What other info would help get to the bottom of this?

Please be gentle: I'm not a techie, so, if you need more info, please tell
me where and how I can find it.

Thanks in advance.
 
Tim said:
Take a look at this:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=314063

Sounds like it may be a duff driver.

What hardware have you installed recently? Specifically, immediately prior
to this starting?

- Tim
Click to expand...
Cheers, Tim. This problem has been happening since I got the PC from Mesh
in October. I've been in touch with them a number of times but all they've
done is send me a disk with a new bios and suggested some bios changes that
slowed the PC down to a crawl.

I'm on the point of calling out the engineer (on-site support warranty) but
I hear they deal with motherboard errors by asking you to return the PC for
investigation - I can't live without a PC for 2 weeks - I'll shrivel up and
die.
 
Have you checked your memory? Download Memtest86 (free, google for it)
which creates a bootable floppy. Make sure you have your bios configured to
disable "USB legacy devices" (not doing so will cause Memtest to hang), and
run this for a few hours to see if you get any memory errors.

Although it may not be the cause of your problem, bad RAM is common and when
present causes all sorts of errors including blue screen errors.

If this is the problem, it is also easily fixed by replacing the RAM. The
only proviso is that if memtest shows errors there is a small possibility
that the problem is with the processor memory, the cache, rather than the
RAM, but most likely if memtest finds errors it is the RAM stick(s).

ken
 
Ken Fox said:
Have you checked your memory? Download Memtest86 (free, google for it)
which creates a bootable floppy. Make sure you have your bios configured to
disable "USB legacy devices" (not doing so will cause Memtest to hang), and
run this for a few hours to see if you get any memory errors.

Although it may not be the cause of your problem, bad RAM is common and when
present causes all sorts of errors including blue screen errors.

If this is the problem, it is also easily fixed by replacing the RAM. The
only proviso is that if memtest shows errors there is a small possibility
that the problem is with the processor memory, the cache, rather than the
RAM, but most likely if memtest finds errors it is the RAM stick(s).

ken



NVidia
Click to expand...
Thanks, Ken. I've already run memtest overnight. Nothing reported, so it
looks as though the problem isn't with the memory.

I've got a tame Mesh technician working with me at the moment so I'll keep
you up to date.
 
Since the NVidia driver was mentioned in one of the BSOD's, I would check
that.
Run Sigverif.exe (start, run, sigverif). This will check that you have
certified drivers etc installed.
For each file it lists, try and find out what the file relates to - it is
likely to be a driver so look in c:\windows\System32\drvivers for the files,
right click properties and have a good look there to see who or what
provided the file & so which piece of hardware. Then check for h/w driver
updates for that piece of hardware.

Another approach would be to remove all non essential h/w and try to
recreate the problem. If the problem has gone, the add the hardware back in
piece by piece and re-test.

Since the common theme is games, I would head for the graphics card and
maybe try a different make / model.

- Tim
 
You'll notice that the programs you claim to be running put a real load on
the CPU and video card. It sounds like you've got a temperature problem in
your sytem: something is overheating.
 
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