Blue screens. Hardware or software?

[de8212]

I've been getting random blue screens for a few weeks now. It used to be at most once a week but over the last few days it has been worse. No new hardware or software has been added recently so i am not sure what to do.

The first thing I thought of was RAM. I have 4 sticks (2GB each). I will run memtest on them this weekend but I have been trying to swap them out in pairs to narrow things down. Both matched pairs still had issues so now I am running them individually.

Can someone tell me exactly what to look for in the error codes to see if it's software or hardware? Isn't all of that in the Event Viewer?

I have no problems reinstalling W7 but really don't want to unless I know the issue isn't hardware.

I did uninstall video cards drivers and sound card drivers hoping one of those might be the issue. Twice when it Blue Screened I was either listening to mp3's or watching videos and scrolling with my mouse. So I thought maybe it was video/audio related. But sometimes I will just get home from work to find it has rebooted and the only thing that might be running would be AVG or maybe utorrent.

Any ideas?

 

[S.K.A]

It's probably coming from the RAM. You should really run a memtest overnight and check.

 

[theevilsharpie]

Software and hardware can mean two different things.

Software vs. hardware could mean a problem with the physical hardware vs. a problem with the programming of the hardware. In that case, software problems tend to be a repeatable (e.g. I run a program and click on option X and then Y happens), whereas hardware problems tend to be random.

Software vs. hardware could also mean a hardware problem (including drivers) or a problem with software installed on the machine. For a consumer computing environment, the vast majority of blue screens will be caused by hardware issues, whereas software faults will generally just cause program errors.

Based on your description, I'd say you have a physical problem with your hardware, and it is most likely memory related.

 

[Devilpapaya]

Look for the stop code that the BSOD generates. Since the BSOD usually goes by very quickly, disable automatic restart on system failure - fit f8 during boot to bring up the safe-mode options, look through them and that should be one of the options.

When the BSOD happens again; write down the stop code. This will generally be a description (something like IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL) as well as a hexadecimal stop code (something like 0x0000007B). Copy both of these down (or just the later, if the former isn't present) and google them.

generally there are 100 other people who have had the same or similar issues, and (most of the time) someone has figured out a fix, or at least the problem.