serious system error

[teddy bear]

every time i leave my computer to download anything for a while, i come back and it has ahd a serious system error, says somethng bout kernel memory dump in the error message. anyone have any idea what could cause this? only thing i can think of is the ezbios installed on it, which would require me taking apart my mothers computer to uninstall it. any help would be greatly appreciated

 

[dejav00]

...

What happened is that while you were downloading, you ran out of available RAM, and the RAM that the NT Kernel in XP was using was over-written, generating a system error because it failed (always does) to load it back.

Solution: More RAM...

 

[teddy bear]

i have 512 of ram, and normally run with about 270 free. are you sure it is the ram? could the ezbios be part of it?

 

[teddy bear]

could it be that i bought cheap ram? i got 512 for 40 bucks

 

[Zedric]

No not unless your RAM is defect. There is a good app to check this with (memtestx86 i think) but I can't remember where you can get it. Try Google.

I'm guessing you have a GeForce card in that computer right? (If you do) I've seen this problem many times. Mostly the computer runs fine until you (sometimes) run games, watch movies or just do nothing for a while. The symtoms are very erratic and hard to isolate. Some have solved their problem by using standard XP drivers for their GeForce, some by turning of ACPI in BIOS, some by turning off AGP Fast Writes (I think...) in BIOS and some (like me) are yet to find a solution. This seems to be a GeForce vs. XP problem. Any (good) solutions are welcome by the way.

 

[dejav00]

...

Come to think of it, I've also had the same problem on machines with Ge-Force cards.......but in the past a RAM upgrade solved my problems so....

 

[teddy bear]

yes, i do have a geforce, it is a geforce mx 420. there are not any WHQL approved drivers for it i have found

 

[dejav00]

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Here comes a major question possibly...

are you using detonator drivers?

if so what version?

 

[teddy bear]

i am not sure what version i am using, i just updated them from cnet catchup today.. i will try to find out which version it is

 

[dejav00]

...

ok, well let me know...

 

[Lactic.Acid]

Something is freezing. Try running one program at a time or something and try to reproduce the BSOD. It could also have to do with overheating, but that comes in later after you've tried to narrow this down to a specific program.
/Lactic

 

[gonaads]

I've had my screen freeze up a couple of times and I'm running an Asus V7700 Deluxe 32MB AGP Card with the newest Detonator drivers 512MB Century RAM AMD Athlon 1Ghz on an A-Bit board. And yes, I know about the problem with this board and vid card cofiguration when it boots. Once XP told me after I reset the system that my video driver was in the process of loading or refreshing a web page or something to that effect when it chocked. XP also froze with my Paint Shop Pro 7.02 once. Go Fig.

 

[Lactic.Acid]

If your screen is freezing, it tends to more often than not be your video card or drivers. Try using different drivers and see if that helps.
/Lactic

 

[teddy bear]

it says my driver version is 2.8.3.2 released 3/9/2002. i notice it only does this when i leave my computer downloading a lto fo stuff, when i leave it with just a little bit of stuff downlaoding it is fine. i am running a cable modem

 

[dejav00]

...

it *could* be possible that as you are downloading, it is loading as much of the download as it can into the RAM, or maybe just overwriting the part of the operating system that is stored in the RAM, causing you to get a BSOD...??

 

[teddy bear]

that might be. i do have the write caching enabled. i will try disabling it and see what happens

 

[Raven76]

Download are written to disk (in a temp file) not to RAM.

Check the error log for alerts/errors. Next time it happens write down the error message and post it here. The messages are cryptic, but sometimes they help.

 

[dejav00]

...

I was referring to something like a buffer.....

 

[gonaads]

I've updated my vid drivers to the new NVIDIA Detonator 2832 drivers as you can see by my config list below my post, and so far so good. Let's hope. I also redid a couple of the XP updates that might not have took correctly. I rolled back the system first then did vid drivers and updates.

 

[teddy bear]

happened again, the error message give on the DSOD was stop 0x0000080 (0x00000000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000) makes no sense to me. any ideas of where else i might find detailed error info?