BSOD Win XP SP3, ntoskrnl.exe?

[abbeyjaye]

Hello,

This is my first time "debugging" a BSOD, although I like to think I'm pretty technically savvy, so hopefully this won't be too hard for someone to help me...

It's my mom's computer and an odd occurrence just started happening.. she claims she has not installed any new software recently - she has no anti virus software (no viruses, I checked). Her computer just started rebooting itself... and it would happen in random times, no consistency of when, but mainly within minutes of booting up.

I turned off the auto-reboot so we could see the blue screens and it ended up being a Page_fault_in_nonepaged_area paging error. STOP: 0000000050 (0XE1609000), 0X00000000, 0X804FCB4F, 0X00000001

She can boot into Safe mode with networking and it runs fine - no errors. This makes me guess it's a device driver or service error, but I am not certain how to pinpoint that...

I have attached a bunch of the minidumps - which I have tried to analyze myself with WinDbg but couldn't get the symbols to register correctly. I am mainly seeing it to be a problem with ntoskrnl.exe though.

I am not sure what to do from here... and could really use some professional advise.. it's beyond me at this point and since I'm only able to remote in to my mom's computer with VNC, I'm not able to totally reformat and install her OS from scratch at this time... so any advise is appreciated. Thank you.

~Abbey

 

[raybay]

We would need more information on the computer and configuration. This is often a hardware issue or an install issue of an update, or a memory failure...

Do a google search of the error message for more details It will take too long and too much space ehre.

 

[abbeyjaye]

Thank you very much for your quick reply.

Please know that I have searched Google up and down and cannot figure out this unique problem because most everyone else with the same error cannot boot into Safe mode. But we can boot and work in Safe mode no problem... I think this is key to knowing what the issue is...

I have ran tests on the RAM without error, although I know this is not always accurate results. I can ask my mom to pop open her box and pull out a RAM stick to test that way, but again, would we be able to use Safe Mode if it was a RAM issue?

The computer is a Dell Dimensions with Intel Pentium III processor, 798MHz, 768 RAM with Win XP Pro SP 3. Everything is on-board.. it's an old machine. She had recent Windows updates.

An honest note to mention is that I recently bought this computer as an upgrade for her from a friend because she had the exactly the same computer, but with less RAM and Pentium II processor.. so this one is exactly the same, just faster - same motherboard. I swapped out the hard drive from her old machine and just plopped it in this machine.. which could be causing some problems with drivers or what not but I did this back in December and it has been running since then without a hitch. Could this be a problem that just started appearing now? If so I guess I need to plan a trip to see my mom so she can stop using Safe Mode.. ugh.

Any additional thoughts or insight is appreciated. Thanks again.