Many frequent STOP error messages (blue screens of death).

Hi Andy,

Your case is different to CAL. One of his minidump has the following symptom

Probably caused by : hardware
*** Possible invalid call from bf81c595 ( win32k!EngLpkInstalled+0x2d16 )
*** Expected target bf800d5a ( win32k+0xd5a )
POSSIBLE_INVALID_CONTROL_TRANSFER: from bf81c595 to bf800d5a
FOLLOWUP_NAME: MachineOwner
MODULE_NAME: hardware
IMAGE_NAME: hardware
DEBUG_FLR_IMAGE_TIMESTAMP: 0
STACK_COMMAND: kb
BUCKET_ID: CPU_CALL_ERROR

One thing I overlooked, one of his minidump crash with bugcheck EA and usually it is related to display card hardware or software error. For your case you don't have this error. This is my second case that the CPU_CALL_ERROR is related to VIC. Now you understand that the feedback from the problem owner is so useful for problem diagnostic. I don't think your case is related to VIC and it is no harm to try.

After you use S3 display card, your device driver is out dated.

Hi cpc,

I now have my GeForce 3 back in my pc. The only XP compatible drivers for the S3 card that i could find i couldnt install because XP didnt like them for some reason. But that is not important now.

I have removed all of my RAM from my PC and now have just one stick from my brother's (stable) PC. Since installing it I have had one BSOD and many program crashes (firefox in particular!). I have attached the minidump for the BSOD. It and several others have referred to USB port drivers and my network adaptor is a USB adapter so i wonder if that is somehow causing some problems. I doubt it is causing all because a lot of crashes have occurred when i have not been using the internet/network at all (only transferring files between hard drives for example).

I will try my brother's PCI network card before swapping CPUs, if i decide to go that far.

I do wondering if a hardware error I have has caused some corruption of data which has been causing other crashes and fooling me into believing a device is not faulty because it has crashed when it is not in the machine. I will have to take a look at my record of crashes since i installed windows.

Regards,
Andy

One more thing, I downloaded a program which tests your CPU, "CPU RightMark Lite". This appeared to cane my PC (reducing the frame rate by a lot). It tested MMX, FPU, EMMX and SSE (combinations of). I think it was working out the movement of planets or something like that. Anyway, despite lots of testing using this my computer didnt crash so im tempted to believe my CPU is not at fault.

Andy

Hi Andy,

Hardware error occurs at random pattern and software error occurs at the same pattern. Usually hardware problem has weired symptom. I don't find any webpage document the symptom windows PC hardware problem. I only base upon the feedback from the problem owner to acculumate my debugging knowledge. I believe your problem is faulty M/B but I cannot guranteer it is 100% correct. There have another good post in this forum has similar problem. If you don't want to change m/b, you can wait for the result of that case.

BTW, your windows 3 years behind. You had better upgrade your windows to latest patch level. It will resolve a lot of known bugs.

Hi cpc,

I really appreciate all you have done for me. Thank you very much!

As you can tell I am reluctant to change my M/b for pretty obvious reasons. But i am now resigning to the fact that i will have to do something major. I am looking at new motherboards now.

Thank you once again, and i will let you know how things go.

Andy

P.S. My windows is so out of date because i am anticipating a reformat once this problem is fixed. I was receiving quite a lot of application errors (and STOP errors of course) before reformatting, when i had fully up-to-date windows.

I now have a brand new motherboard (ASUS A7V880) using onboard sound and onboard LAN.

So far I have had 5 random restarts / BSOD, producing 3 dump files (attached). I've had an 0xA, and 0x44 MLTIPLE_IRQ_COMPLETE_REQUEST and 0x8E.

If it is relevent the motherboard detects my CPU incorrectly. After a bit of reasearch into the matter it may be an issue with ASUS and not my PC, but this is something im looking to sort out.

The problem is it originally detected my cpu as "Athlon XP 1100MHz". It should be Athlon XP 1700+ 1.47GHz. I changed the settings in BIOS manually and it is now running at 1.47GHz but is recognised as "Athlon XP 2200+". Very weird.

cpc, i've found one more dump file i dont think i had before. I havent noticed a crash when it could have been made.

It is a 7F crash and says "memory_corruption". Im not sure what to make of it. Would you mind taking a look at the dump file attached and tell me what you think?

My PC seems much more stable now. The crashes im experiencing are showing "new" STOP codes (44 and 7f).

Hi Andy,

All of your recent minidumps are crashed with faulty ram. Maybe the BIOS setting of your RAM is incompatible to new m/b. Try downclock the ram.

bingo! thanks again cpc, i'll look into it. I think at the moment it is all set to automatic for the RAM. Asus published a list of compatible RAM, but unfortunately i dont know what brand mine is because i bought it unbranded and there's no obvious brand name on it.

I'm nearly 100% sure now that my motherboard was indeed to fault. Thank you cpc for all your help. I greatly appreciate it.

Hi eveningWC,

Do you have any update of your problem?