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Blue screens and hardware and dell, oh my!

N

Nagisaki

Junior Member
Hey, my boss gave me an old dell 4600 to play with and get working, but unfortunately I can't figure out exactly what is wrong with it.

When running in windows, it will sporadically give a blue screen (or rather, STOP) error, reading a variety of different things, from IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, to PFN_LIST_CORRUPT, to not even displaying an error code.

They used to happen even in idle, but those have disappeared over time. At first I thought it was the video card because of the IRQL error, but after putting in another video card and still having it crash, I guessed that was probably not the case.

Also, I've re-installed the operating system two times now, but still get the errors, so I don't think it's a driver problem.

One odd thing I've noticed, is that it crashes less frequently when under heavy stress from a 3-d application like Guild Wars, where as streaming music and reading Anandtech reviews causes a crash.

I am completely baffled by this one, any help at all would be much appreciated!
 
I tried replaceing the power supply, but unfortunately that didn't help anything, the errors kept rolling in. When I get back to work on monday I'm going to try swaping out the RAM, then the CPU.

I'm kind of hoping it's not a problem withe motherboard, because dell does not want to give up a motherboard for this unless I can get an error in their accursed diagnostics software to show up, but one never does. If anyone can think of something it might be becides the motherboard, I'd be more then glad to try it, even if it's completely obscure (aside from dancing circles arround it naked while chanting to the rain gods to smite this evil... that's a little much 😛)

Thanks for the help!

Edit: Oh, and I found another error poping up recently, page fault in non paged area.
 
A 2.8GHz machine is considered old?

What type of Power Supply did you put in?

The Dimension 4600 had bad caps used in the PSU, so they were
prone to a high failure rate.

My monies on either the RAM or the Hard Drive.
 
Originally posted by: Nagisaki
Hey, my boss gave me an old dell 4600 to play with and get working, but unfortunately I can't figure out exactly what is wrong with it.

When running in windows, it will sporadically give a blue screen (or rather, STOP) error, reading a variety of different things, from IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, to PFN_LIST_CORRUPT, to not even displaying an error code.

They used to happen even in idle, but those have disappeared over time. At first I thought it was the video card because of the IRQL error, but after putting in another video card and still having it crash, I guessed that was probably not the case.

Also, I've re-installed the operating system two times now, but still get the errors, so I don't think it's a driver problem.

One odd thing I've noticed, is that it crashes less frequently when under heavy stress from a 3-d application like Guild Wars, where as streaming music and reading Anandtech reviews causes a crash.

I am completely baffled by this one, any help at all would be much appreciated!
Click to expand...

Have you looked at the dumps in a debugger to see what causes them? If not, try it out - see my .sig and go to the web page and try it out.
 
Wow, been a while since this has been posted to. Thanks for the tip, I'll give that a try when I get back to the office tomorow, but it seems to be running stable now. I disabled HT on the chip, and it hasn't crashed since. My best guess is the CPU's ****** at this point, but if it runs fine w/o HT, I'll leave it as is.
 
OK, but I'd still suggest spending 5 minutes downloading the debugger and trying it out - can't hurt a bit, and you'll be able to see what's happening. It could easily be that there's a driver that has a problem with HT, and if you could update that driver, you could get HT going again.
 
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