What can cause a BSOD

06
2014-04
  • Kells

    I keep getting a blue screen of death (memory parity check error) when trying to watch the olympics online at ctv.ca (silverlight player). I can watch for max 10mins then it goes down.

    So to diagnose the problem I ran memtest86 and the test passed with no errors. Then I tried prime95 (blend) for an hour and had no problems. I tried using a couple different RAM modules and that didn't help.

    What components are most likely causing the BSOD? What else can I do to figure out what the problem is/solve it? If I need to replace parts, what order should I do it in?

    OS: Vista Business 64bit
    MB: Asus p5n32e sli plus
    RAM: Mushkin Silverline Frostbyte PC-6400 (996557)
    CPU: Core 2 Duo E8400
    GPU: ATI HD4800

    • Answers
  • geek

    Nowadays it happens mostly because of broken hardware or buggy video drivers.

  • fluxtendu

    You could use Blue Screen Viewer to find the culprit software or driver

  • ryanyama

    What browser version are you using with silverlight? Did you recently install a new version of silverlight player? You can also take a look in the silverlight forums and submit a bug if necessary http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/28.aspx. You should try ripping out silverlight and reinstalling it and see if it resolves your issue.

  • bastibe

    A BSOD is definitely a crashing driver. Nothing else can actually stall the kernel. However, getting a BSOD actually is a good thing, since a BSOD means that the kernel actually cought the problem and stored a crashdump somewhere on your system that you can use to find the actual cause of the problem.

    Note that while the BSOD was caused by a crashing driver this does not necessarily mean that the driver is faulty. Probably, some other software was just using the driver incorrectly and thereby made it crash. With some digging, this is usually recorded in the crashdump, too.

    Reading the crashdump however is rather difficult. Sysinternals has some tool to read crashdumps but honestly, this is not something a non-programmer would want to use. Perhaps someone else can point you to some usable software to that end.

  • Area 51

    Make sure to choose the correct memory voltage setting in the BIOS, speaking of which, update the BIOS to the latest version if necessary.


    • Related Question

    BSODs and Prime95 failures
  • Mike Pateras

    My computer is notoriously unstable. It blue screens all the time. I'm running Windows 7. Here's what's in the box:

    • Intel Core i7 920 (Stock cooler, not overclocked)
    • Gigabyte EX58-UD3R motherboard
    • 6GB (3x2GB) OCZ Gold memory (set to 1333MHz, it has problems booting if I leave it at 1066)
    • GeForce 9500 GT
    • Antec 650W power supply

    When idle it seems to run at between around 40 and 50 degrees Celsius, according to SpeedFan. I've run many memory tests, and none of them have come up with any problems.

    Now I've received several messages when it Blue Screens:

    • IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
    • Page fault when not paging (or something like that)
    • Random addresses/registered

    Unfortunately, they go by too quickly for me to take much from them.

    I just ran Microsoft's hot fix for the first (though I'm not positive that my error is 100% the same as theirs, I don't know if I'm getting the 0x0000000A part), so I don't know if that will help or not, but if Prim95 is any indication, it won't, for the following reason:

    When I run Prime95, 8 threads start up, and they all stop very quickly. I get the following errors in the results.txt file:

    [Tue Feb 16 15:44:35 2010] 
FATAL ERROR: Rounding was 0.5, expected less than 0.4 
Hardware failure detected, consult stress.txt file. 
FATAL ERROR: Rounding was 0.5, expected less than 0.4 
Hardware failure detected, consult stress.txt file. 
FATAL ERROR: Rounding was 0.5, expected less than 0.4 
Hardware failure detected, consult stress.txt file. 
FATAL ERROR: Resulting sum was 4050964008042496, expected: 2785959515376393 
Hardware failure detected, consult stress.txt file. 
FATAL ERROR: Resulting sum was 4.042840052791945e+056, expected: 3.789462128888016e+016 
Hardware failure detected, consult stress.txt file. 
FATAL ERROR: Resulting sum was 5.593535921577141e+247, expected: 1.208964328863723e+017 
Hardware failure detected, consult stress.txt file.

    When I looked at the stress.txt file, it suggested memory might be my problem, but as I said, I've run multiple memory tests (MemTest86, I think? It was a while ago), and no problems have been detected.

    After running the hotfix, the test threads managed to stay running a little longer, and while my temperatures definitely rose, they never really got about 60C.

    So, basically I see three problems:

    1. I'm running pretty hot. With the stock cooler, I idle close to 50 on some cores with the side of my case off. Putting my hand in front of the CPU fan, I don't really feel much of a breeze. Is this normal for the 920 stock cooler?
    2. I blue screen all the time (like 1-4 times per day).
    3. I can't seem to run Prime95 for more than a few seconds.

    Can anyone point me in the direction of what might be going wrong here, and perhaps what to do to confirm/fix the problem?

    Thank you.


    • Related Answers
  • William Hilsum

    First things first - Go to Control Panel > System (Windows Key+Pause/Break) and then under Advanced, you should see "Startup and recovery", click Settings and you can disable Automatic restart on system failure.

    Next time a BSOD occurs, you can see what the cause is.

    Also, you may want to see Blue Screen View, a very good tool to help you see previous Blue screen errors.

    Now, As ~quack said, just because it passes some tests, doesn't mean it is good. If you ran it for a few hours, swapping the modules around and re-running again may make it quickly touch some places it didn't before - but really, unless you run memtest86+ for around (or ideally over) 48 hours, you will not have a good result.

    Next, the errors you said are most commonly down to faulty/corrupt/bad memory, but can really be anything - the most likely reason is bad/dodgy device drivers.

    If you are getting this every time you run Prime95, I would highly recommend you try unplugging EVERYTHING from your machine other than power, video and keyboard (and mouse, unless you are confident of using the machine without one). Now, go to safe mode and try running Prime 95 again. This is the best way of testing if it is a driver issue - apart from actually reinstalling Windows from scratch and not installing any drivers!

    If you are still seeing random problems and Memtest86+ really is not showing errors, it is most likely a problem with the motherboard or even CPU, however, this can be very hard to diagnose.

    As for temperature - the lower the temperature, the slower the fan speed - your CPU is very cool and there is nothing to worry about.

  • Sathya

    I had a similar problem recently: system had shown some instabilities, Prime95 returned hardware failure, etc. I ran memtests until the cows came home, all runs came up clear, really drove me crackers ... in the end it turned out the memory voltage was too low.

  • ryantmer

    I have a similar setup, and had similar problems. As mentioned above, it was solved with a voltage change. I have the exact same RAM kit, and the problem is that it will automatically set itself at 1.5V, whereas it's made to run at 1.65V. Change this in your BIOS, and you should be golden! (Ha.)