Please help with Blue Screen of Death

[TeABaG88]

Ok here are my stats: WIn XP Pro (Clean Install), P4 1.7 ghz, 256 mb RDRAM, and a GE Force 3.

Windows XP crashes on me ALL THE TIME. It is constanly giving me either a BSOD or an application crash. The BSOD gives me a lot of different messages. Sometimes its PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGED_AREA, other times it DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS .... and sometimes it says stuff about win32k.sys

I cannot stand this. I have tried so many things. I have all the new drivers for everything. And i only have my ge force 3 card and my promise pci card plugged into my pci/agp slots. I took everything else out and it still never fixed it. I can only play Max Payne for about 15 seconds before it blue screens. Anyone have any idea? Here are my possibilties:
(1) Power supply?? I have 300 w though
(2) Bad RAM?? I really think that its this but when i had win98 on there everything was cool.
(3) Bad RAM on ge force 3?
(4) Driver problems with graphics card ( but i have the newest nvidia ones)
(5) Virus (possibly in BIOS) ?

I am narrowed down to these. I also have the newest BIOS drivers for my intel motherboard. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. Someone please help!! I am ready to destroy my computer because i have been troubleshooting this for over 3 weeks!
Thanks....

 

[CraigRT]

I'm sorry i have to rant here.. I see this kind of crap all the time.. people calling our company for tech support with winXP and having stupid problems like this all the time.. I had done a critical update for an XP PC and it never booted again after that... FORMAT TIME.. Why does XP have so suck SO HARD?? it's such a POS, I have never myself seen ANYTHING good about this damn OS.. it's trouble for me, and most of my co-workers, it's annoying to see this kind of stuff! BOO TO XP!

Win2K forever!

As for your problem, try going to the MS knowledge base and type in the exact error message, you'll find something there i am almost sure, If it's one thing Microsoft does right, it's the knowledge base.. (and W2K)

 

[TeABaG88]

bump.... anyone?

 

[valiant]

I had a similar problem on an Epox 8k7a+ with a thunderbird 1400, i had 512 megs ddr, and i kept getting BSoD and random crashes. I then boutght 512 ddr (2x256) from crucial and have been fine. I know this is pretty diffrent from you system, but sounds like a similar problem

 

[TeABaG88]

Thanks, anyone else have this problem?

 

[theplanb]

It's not overclockered, is it?

 

[TeABaG88]

no i have never overclocked it. i never have really messed with that sort of thing. how can i tell if it is ( or overclock it if i want to in the future?)

 

[MCS]

I have been having similar problems with my system and I tried two things to fix it:

a) Disabled NAV2002 Real Time Procection
b) Increased the cooling in my system and bought case and CPU temp down by 5C

Random BSODs completely stopped - only trouble is I am not 100% sure which are these things actually fixed it.

And now I probably never will, because I have new problem now, and Windows will not boot at all, so I may have to format and start fresh.

 

[teddymines]

What type of power supply do you have? What are your temps? Did this happen immediately after the clean install, or after you installed some other software?

 

[fkloster]

I bet your sound card is the GTXP ay? Or a Hercules card? Tell me it isn't so...

 

[TeABaG88]

Actually my sound card is the game theater by hercules. How did you know? The weird thing is though is that I dont even have it in my stsem now, i toook the card out and uninstalled the drivers and i still get the same crap. As for my power supply, its 300 watts. My computer is actually an Alienware, i just got the motherboard, case and videocard from them. Everything else I got myself. Alienware did an excellent job with cooling so i dont think its that. I also have the intel active monitor which watches my temperature and it is always in the normal range. And about when it started happening: Well, once I put Win XP on there I never tried to play any games for like a month because I was so busy with school. Then I did try to play some games and thats when I would get the BSOD after about 10 seconds of AVP 2. As far as getting BSOD just running WIndows and not any games, I can remember getting them after I had the clean install ( although not at all as frequent as i am now). Thats for the advice, I am gonna take Norton System Works off of here completely if see if that does anything. Any other advice?

 

[TeABaG88]

Could it be some bad ram? Here are the main times when it gives me a BSoD:
(1) Playing any 3d game ( Max Payne, NHL 2002, etc.)
(2) When I have a couple windows open and I click on one in the taskbar that was minimized. Right before the window pops up, it gives me a BSoD. I think that that would almost have to be bad ram?
(3) Sometimes I get it on the startup right before the welcome screen.
(4) And finally, I get it sometimes when I am viewing a webpage and i am scrolling down or up.

What does everyone think?

 

[teddymines]

Even though you removed the Hercules sound card and drivers, it can still cause problems even if it is in the same room.

Sounds like memory. Are you pushing it too hard (running cas2.5 ram at cas2) or not putting enough voltage on it? Try taking one stick out or reseating them. Can you borrow a friend's ram to see he gets errors and you don't?

I hope you get this solved.

 

[TheKub]

Have you tried a reinstall with just the video card???... I had all 3 of those errors with WinXP and my SBLive (playing ghost recon/cs/DOD/AvP2/etc). Also, uninstalling the drivers may not always get everyting out...


Remember do a CLEAN install with ONLY the video card... and if that fails.... do Win 2k

 

[TeABaG88]

Ok here is the latest and i am baffled

I have a second hard drive, so i took my first hard drive out and formatted my second one. On my clean hard drive i did an install of windows xp and it installed fine. But windows gave me a BSoD on the first time that windows was loading! In fact it gave me the BSoD every time. The only way I could go in was to go into safe mode. What would cause that?

 

[TeABaG88]

And as far as the RAM goes, all of the voltage settings are facotry set so that shouldnt be the problem right? I have reseated all 4 of my RIMM's. And im sorry to say but i dont know anyone with RDRAM so if it is the RAM i will just have to find out when i buy new ram.

Here is another VERY interesting reason why I might think its bad RAM:

Ok, when i reseated the RAM, i decided to switch all 4 RIMMs around and then loaded Windows and Windows crashed when I only had like 1 application open. However if i swicthed them around again, I could do a little more without it crashing. Wouldnt this be a bad RAM module because windows isnt using it until I load more stuff?

 

[InFecTed]

Dude, believe me, winXP isn't worth the trouble.
I had some similar issues and no matter what I did BSODs were there (more or less frequent but still there).
Now I'm back to win98se, it's perfectly stable and my games run way faster.

XP is a POS. Definitly needs Service packs.

 

[TeABaG88]

Ok i tried installing XP with just my video card and i still got the BSoD in games after 5 seconds. So i am done to these possibilities:
(1) Bad RAM
(2) Bad Video Card
(3) Driver conflict with Video Card


I will get a video card form someone to test that but I might just buy some RAM because I was going to get more anyways. I download a program to test my RAM that runs in dos and it keep locking up on me because I dont think that it was made to test RDRAM. I am so mad at this thing, I really hate windows XP it is driving me nuts......

 

[BeauJangles]

As for everyone who is bashing XP... I had 2k on my system and was getting Bsods during boot-up (after a restart, but not always), i tried extending the shutdown time to gvie win2k enough time to write all the RAM contents to the HDD, but that didn't fix it. I upgraded to xp pro and guess what? problem's gone...

TeABaG88 - i would try installing 2k and see if the same thing happens. Sometimes OSes just don't seem to like certain hardware (or users as the case may be )

 

[MCS]

<< i tried extending the shutdown time to gvie win2k enough time to write all the RAM contents to the HDD >>



Hmmm, hadn't thought of that one!

 

[Need4Speed]

just wanted to add my 2 cents to this thread..this specific BSOD is one of great mystery that many many peeps are getting in win2k and/or winxp. just do a search with google and see how popular this baby is. for me, i have had it happen on several systems with different configs.

the first one:
Asus k7v, Slot A Athlon 750, MX300 sound card...I shuffeld cards around, removed cards, and even replaced the mx300 with a SB64....no change, kept getting the BSOD at random times

the second one:
MSI k7t turbo, Socket a tbird 1ghz, SB lIve sound card...same deal as above, I tried replacing the sound cards..nothing

the third one:
epox 8kha+, socket a 1800+, Herc GTXP...again same problems

At first I thought it could be a problem with the SB cards and the VIA chipsets, but since it also happened with the GTXP and the MX300, I doubt that this could have been it. Rumor has it, that this is the result of IRQ conflicts and/or poor drivers...not necessarily due to ACPI....for the time being I have assigned IRQ's to my devices manually in the BIOS and it seems to be stable so far...but I'm sure it will surface again.

Again, this has happened with differebt branded sound cards in win2k and winxp...so I doubt that it could be a CL or Herc bug.

I know its not much help, but thought i'd toss it out anyways

 

[Turkey22]

You are aware that the nvidia detonator 23.11 (newest) drivers are having big problems with winXP right? I'm surprised someone hasn't mentioned it yet. Now some people didn't have any problems with them but I think that most people did. I would scale back the driver 21.83 is the last official, to make sure that it's not the driver.

 

[PanJack]

I'm having the exact same problems with XP (BSOD and application crashes constantly in anything that is kinda 3d). And I have about the same hardware (P4 1.6 with P4t-e but gforce 2).

I've done everything I can think. My next step is a clean install of XP. (Third in a week!).

PanJack.

 

[CraigRT]

I don't suppose you ever did try searching the knowledge base, I went on there with a few of your error messages and it came up with results right away, I still think you should look on there some more if you haven't already.

I shall linkify it for your easy navigation....

good luck.