Need help with BSOD

[vitec]

System configs:
P4 1.7 GHz, Intel 845 GBV motherboard - both 3 years old.
512 MB RAM (2*256) - one 1.5 year sold, other less than 2 months
80 GB HDD and 40 GB HDD
1 CDRW and 1 Combo optical drives
Geforce 2 MX 400 64 MB

Problem:
I have Win98 and WinXP on my PC. Lately I have been getting either frequent restarts or blue screens of death. The BSODs - have on of these two messages
PFN LIST CORRUPT
IRQ LESS THAN OR EQUAL

I was under the impression that this could be something to do with my WinXP. I tried booting into Win98 and was able to get a stable system for almost 30 mins. (but I tried it only once). In XP, it would either conk out during bootup or just after login.

I thought the better option would be re-install XP, so I booted via the XP installation CD and got up to the disk management part when I got the BSOD once again.

Now I'm not so sure if this is a OS or S/W issue. Could it be my motherboard or something to do with RAM ?

I'm due for an upgrade but first I need to make sure which part of my system actually needs an immediate overhaul.

 

[usernamemax20charact]

Sounds like a hard ware problem to me. Are you overclocking? Have you tried resetting the BIOS to its defaults?

 

[vitec]

I'm not overclocking it. I will set the BIOS to its defaults and check, but I don't think I have changed anything recently. The problem started showing up only a few days ago, till then everything was good.

 

[usernamemax20charact]

Might wanna check RAM, PSU, video card... etc.

I remember that my cousin's pc was constantly restarting and BSODing because his video card got fried.... heatsink fan gave out. When I put in an old video card I had lying around, problems went away.

 

[vitec]

I can try checking all those. Guess I will start of with RAM. But is there something in specific that I need to look for or I just have to check the whole set of things.

 

[bocamojo]

Only other time I've heard of that error is when it was related to a driver passing bad info, or passing the info twice. Also heard some users have this type of issue after upgrading to SP2. Don't think this is a hardware issue.

 

[jameswhite1979]

i would start with the memory if you have two dimms just take one out at a time and run with that for a while and see what happens

 

[bowserjs]

Might want to run Memtest on the memory

 

[vitec]

Thanks for all your replies. I have been unable to do any of the suggested options yesterday - was caught in a lot of work. Will start with trying out the RAM options and check for any driver error as well.

 

[dodgybob]

If you got a BSOD just booting off the win xp cd and without the os on the disk actually loading then it sounds like a hardware problem rather than a driver issue as none of those (except the standard basic ones on the xp cd) will have loaded. Ram does inded seem like a good place to start.

 

[vitec]

I have tried removing one of the 256MB RAM sticks and now the system is very stable
I ran it for almost 1 hour the day before and yesterday it ran for almost 2 hours without any issues. Need some more time before I can be certain that RAM is the issue but for now that seems to be the reason. Thanks for all your help, will keep you guys posted.