Problem PC's

[chrism]

Hi there,

I am a reseller and I have a customer who has been having the same freezing problems with his PC's since he bought them from us in 2002.

I'm trying to find out the problem and I have attached a memory dmp (sorry could only obtain 1) and don't have much experience with reading dump files.

There 2 identical PC's and they both get the same errors:

AMD Athlon 1800XP Socket A CPU
MSI MS-M390M Socket A Motherboard
Generic 256MB PC2100 DDR Memory
Seagate Barracuda IV 40GB 7200rpm
Mitsumi 3.5" 1.44MB Floppy Drive
Integrated ProSavage8 2D/3D Graphics
Integrated AC97 Audio
LG 52x CD-ROM
Cnet Pro200 10/100 NIC
Samsung 753S 17" Monitor
Microsoft Windows XP Professional OEM

Both PC's have been freezing randomly, here is a quote from my customer:

"Lockups. Can be running any program but most often while using a Microsoft Office program such as Word or Outlook (which are the two we use most of).

Re drivers - we run very vanilla software (Microsoft, Acrobat, MYOB) and no peripherals directly connected.
I update drivers manually via the Microsoft Device Manager's "Update" button, and also the Graphics and NIC drivers via a Google search, regularly but still the problems occur."

Today they had their first bsod which I think is a fairly generic one looking at it:
0x00000050 (0xff000004, 0x00000001, 0xbf802ade, 0x00000000).

We've had both PC's in our shop in 2002 and ran burnin/memtests etc without errors.

Any help at all would be appreciated.


**EDIT**

I've managed to find another minidmp (attached) which points towards winword/win32k.sys which could well be a memory problem?

I've taken note of the VIA chipsets from 2002 and have forwarded the latest recommended drivers from the VIA website to our customer.

Once again, cheers for your help.
Chrism

 

[howard_hopkinso]

Hello and welcome to Techspot.

It`s very difficult to be sure from only one minidump.

The minidump crashes at sapisvr.exe. This is related to the Windows Speech Recognition programme.

More info is available HERE.

To disable the programme do the following.

Go to Control Panel
Click on Regional and Language Options
Click on the Languages tab
Click on the Details button
Click on Speech Recognition
Click the Remove button

See if that helps.

Regards Howard :wave: :wave:

 

[Rick]

I haven't had the time to look at the minidump yet, but I can tell you the most likely causes are memory, overheating or a bad hard drive.

You mentioned you've run diagnostics, but diagnostics for computers aren't quite like blood work - the results aren't definitive - and sometimes they need to be done repeatedly to expose errors.

If it happens frequently while accessing MS Office products, perhaps the program resides on a bad sector of the drive? I think it would be worthwhile to run a manufacturer's drive diagnostic a few times to double check. You can find a list of such programs here.

I'd triple check the memory too with Memtest+ (www.memtest.org. Make sure your client runs all the advanced tests - not just the default 7 - and make sure they run the program for a full day. This is also a good overheating test, as it is very CPU intensive.

If you have access to the computer, maybe a temporary, parallel install of Windows would help you determine if it is a software or hardware issue.

Driver updates are a possibility as well. 2002 was a bad year for chipset drivers (VIA anyone?), so try updating things like the chipset drivers.

Malware, spyware, adware, viruses etc.. Are certainly worth checking for as well.

 

[chrism]

Thanks very much for your comments - I'll pass on the speech recognition suggestion.

Yeah I wasn't working for the company when they placed the original order but I am aware of the procedures that would have been carried out like overnight memtests, virus scans and hardware isolation etc - I would like to confirm this myself as I have asked our customer to return these to us.

I agree with installing windows on a test hard drive to try eliminate the type of problem.

I'll try and locate some more dumps from our customer.

Thanks again I really appreciate your help.
Chrism