Blue Screens

[Liquido]

ok i got a brand new pc (see signature) and i have problems with blue screens.

the errors are :

wink2.sys

PFN_CORRUPT

IRQL_LESS_OR_EQUAL

and sometimes it just goes Blue screen without saying the error..

can u help me plz? i am desperate coz i have this pc for like a month or less..

thanks in advance.

 

[Sonic587]

Can you list your specs in detail? When do these bluesceens happen? Randomly? Have you tried just using one stick of RAM at a time?

 

[Stiganator]

that is sometimes a psu problem, but it can mean many things besides that, MS doesn't have the best error descriptions. also possibly bad HD or just a corrupt sector.

 

[Liquido]

they happen randomly and everyday

i have Q-teq psu 450W
i have i DVDROM and one CD RW and a floppy
2 hard drives

 

[stevty2889]

Not sure about that PSU, never heard of them before, and that could definatly be the cause of the problems. You also should run memtest, as it could be memory issues causing those errors, and could also be driver issues. Have you installed any new hardware recently before the problems started?

 

[Liquido]

qteq psu's are very famous man and very reliable.
no i havent install anything thats why i am worried and i dont know where to start or how

 

[Sideswipe001]

This is a brand new computer that you bought or built? And did it come with the operating system installed, or did you install it yourself?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Liquido
qteq psu's are very famous man and very reliable.
no i havent install anything thats why i am worried and i dont know where to start or how

Uh, Q-Tec PSUs are utter crap. Just so you know. I would very much recommend replacing it with a name-brand PSU.

In any case, start with basic testing; put everything at stock and run memtest86, and if that passes, try Prime95's torture testing with nothing else running. If you can't pass those, you have basic hardware problems.

 

[Jeff7]

These BSOD's should also give a STOP code, something like:
STOP: 0x000001A, followed by three more hexadecimal number strings.

That first hex string can be entered into Microsoft's website's search engine; entered like "STOP 0x1A" or whatever it might be for your system.

As for Q-Tec being famous, I can't say I've heard of them. I've heard of:
- Deer. Adeqate generic PSU's for low-power systems that aren't too critical)
- Antec. Good. Not PC Power and Cooling good, but good.
- Enermax. Never used one, but they're said to be good.
- Fortron.
- L&C. Generic stuff. In my experience, they don't sustain high-power output levels well, as evidenced by one that had a resistor blow up when I ran a CPU stress test. The resistor literally blasted itself apart, and the circuit board below it was blackened.
- Enlight.
- Duro. These are crap. The circuit board is sparsely populated, the heatsinks are small, and it just feels cheap. Low-res comparison of Duro 400W vs Antec 350W
High res picture.


So give memtest a shot; go through its first 3 menus too and enable all tests, enable testing of All memory, and enable cache. Any errors in memtest are a bad thing. Check if they occur at the same addresses. If the same addresses are failing every pass, it's probably bad memory. If the addresses are seemingly random, it's probably not the RAM itself. Maybe the timings are wrong, the voltage too low, or else the power is just too dirty. I've never seen the inside of a Q-Tec PSU, so I can't say how good they might actually be.

I just did some Google searching to find info on Q-tec supplies. This thread does not build confidence in them. But then I did find some reviews of their Gold-series PSU's that showed them to be fairly decent. Not Antec or Enermax grade, but adequate. Their circuit boards appear to be fairly well-packed too. What model is this Q-Tec PSU you have?

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Q-Tec blows, too many members of nForcersHQ have provided terrible feedback on them for me to disregard.

Now, "the PFN error is a bugcheck that indicates that the page frame number (PFN) list is corrupt. e.g. This error is typically caused by drivers passing bad memory descriptor lists. For example, a driver might have called MmUnlockPages twice with the same list"

What order did you install the OS and drivers in? For troubleshooting purposes you can go in the bios and turn off fastwrites and 8x agp support and enable vid ram caching if the setting is present. You could also try the ram 1 stick at a time and set the timings manually to be conservative i.e. 3-3-3-10 and bump the voltage a notch or 2.

 

[Liquido]

i built the pc myself.. i bought the 4 parts as u see in the signature..
i installed windows XP proffesional edition..
after the first boot in windows i put the drivers which came with the mobo ( drivers for nforce 3 and some other that was on the cd which they had to be installed)

 

[Liquido]

i had a blue screen right now and happened while i was installing daemon tools and another one while i was installing alcohol 120%.
the error was something about NON EXECUTABLE MEMORY TO EXECUTE something like that

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Try the advice about the ram I provided, you would not be the first person to have ram trouble with that board.

 

[Liquido]

i am not familiar with the timings.. do u know what timings should i put?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Liquido
i am not familiar with the timings.. do u know what timings should i put?

Just leave them at the automatic defaults, or set them to the loosest ones (the highest values available, normally 3-3-3-8 or something along those lines).

 

[Liquido]

i did the memtest for 2 hours and no errors..

do u think that i have to buy a new psu ?
is there any possibility to be a hard drive problem?

 

[Matthias99]

2 hours isn't enough, especially if you just left it at the default settings (WHY they set the default to something other than "all tests", I'll never understand). Set it to "all tests", then let it run overnight (it'll take a few hours for each pass; you want 2 or 3 passes). If you pass that with no errors, you can be almost certain your RAM is OK.

If that works, try Prime95's 'torture test' option for a few hours. I use 'Blend'; it tests both the CPU and RAM pretty heavily. Failure here at stock speeds most likely means your RAM or CPU is having issues (although it could be the PSU, if it's very flaky).

If *that* works, try looping 3DMark01 for a while (tests CPU, RAM, and video card). If Prime95 works but 3DMark fails, then either your graphics card is the problem (you'd have to have another one around to test), or your PSU is inadequate (this test stresses the PSU more, since the graphics card draws a lot of power).

If all that passes, but you still get random crashes, *then* I would suspect the hard drive, maybe.

 

[Liquido]

i have done the prime95 and passed a couple weeks ago
i have done more than 5 times 3D MARK 01,03,05 each one.
i dont think its a hardware problem but i cant say what it is

 

[Matthias99]

Humor me and at least try the overnight memtest and a multi-hour run of Prime95. And if you're going to run 3DMark01 as a stability test, set it to loop and let it run for a few hours.

If you think your HDD might be having issues, you can download diagnostic software from the manufacturer, but the IRQL_LESS_THAN_EQUAL error is, in my experience, usually because of an unstable CPU/RAM.

 

[Liquido]

i tried everything
prime95
memtest
everything completed with no errors.
a friend of mine told me to switch off the hyper throttling from BIOS coz he had a problem with that.. i did it and for a day i didnt have blue screen which is good because i had every single day blue screens