Specs:
Toshiba M35X-S349 (Pentium M 1.7GHz)
512MB RAM
80GB HD
Win XP Home
All service packs and updates

Hi there! Long time listener, first time caller.
My computer started crashing pretty regularly about a week ago. The M.O. of the crash is as follows: Without warning, the mouse and screen are frozen and the machine will not respond to Ctrl-Alt-Del or other keyboard entry. The fan, however, still blows when this state occurs. In fact, I thought the problem may have to do with the fan--as the fan always seemed to turn on right when the problem occurred (though not vice versa of course)--or with moving the machine, as it seemed like it often happened a lot when I would move the machine. However, this seems unlikely as the error does not replicate in Safe Mode.

Interestingly, when I would look in the Event Viewer, there was no record of anything happening at the time of the crashes.

Last night, the machine crashed several times in the span of an hour (which was not particularly unusual at this point)--BUT, then the Blue Screen of Death flashed by for the first time, and the machine restarted itself. After rebooting, the Event Viewer DID show an error, the full information from which I have pasted below my message.

Since that blue screen error, the crash occurs 100% of the time after bootup. Usually, I have about 30 seconds to a minute after startup processes have loaded up before the freeze happens. At this point, I can only boot into Safe Mode. I have followed the instructions here up through posting minidumps, but am unable to solve my problem.

I thought it might be my BIOS, but given that I can load into Safe Mode just fine that seems unlikely. I also thought I might have a problem with ASPIEC, which controls the embedded controller and power management stuff, because I have had a lot of weirdness with my Toshiba Power Management--in that there have been several periods over the 3 1/2 years I've owned the machine where the Toshiba Power Management software seems to take a vacation, and the Windows Power Management is active instead. During those times, the machine does not automatically come out of hibernation when I open the screen, and several other power-related things are buggy with the machine (like the battery, which likes to go straight from 85% percent full to 6% full). However, when loading into Safe Mode (which works okay, thank goodness), one of the couple dozen drivers that does load up is ASPIEC.sys, so it seems unlikely that that alone is causing any problem.

Errors of this type are usually driver-related, and the fact that I can boot into Safe Mode OK seems to indicate that it is a driver problem as well. I haven't changed any drivers lately, but I guess something has become corrupt and I don't know how to isolate it. I updated my video driver (crappy embedded Intel graphics processor) as that is often the problem, but that did not fix the crash.

I'm in grad school, and hosed. I throw myself upon your collective mercies.

Thanks for any help!
Best,
Jed

---------------------------------------------
Source: System Error
Category: (102)
Event ID: 1003

Error code 1000008e, parameter1 c0000005, parameter2 bf826c1d, parameter3 ed1ebcdc, parameter4 00000000.

0000: 53 79 73 74 65 6d 20 45 System E

0008: 72 72 6f 72 20 20 45 72 rror Er

0010: 72 6f 72 20 63 6f 64 65 ror code

0018: 20 31 30 30 30 30 30 38 1000008

0020: 65 20 20 50 61 72 61 6d e Param

0028: 65 74 65 72 73 20 63 30 eters c0

0030: 30 30 30 30 30 35 2c 20 000005,

0038: 62 66 38 32 36 63 31 64 bf826c1d

0040: 2c 20 65 64 31 65 62 63 , ed1ebc

0048: 64 63 2c 20 30 30 30 30 dc, 0000

0050: 30 30 30 30 0000



0000: 74737953 45206d65 726f7272 72452020

0010: 20726f72 65646f63 30303120 38303030

0020: 50202065 6d617261 72657465 30632073

0030: 30303030 202c3530 32386662 64316336

0040: 6465202c 63626531 202c6364 30303030

0050: 30303030

Hello and welcome to Techspot.

Your minidumps crash with various culprits including hardware and memory corruption.

I suggest you may have a ram or other hardware problem.

Go and follow the instructions in this thread for testing your ram.

You might also want to take a look at this thread HERE.

Regards Howard :wave: :wave:

Hi Howard! Thanks so much for your reply.
I definitely had already seen the "Before you post..." page--it's golden. I did everything short of physically remove the RAM and clean it (I've never opened the case of this laptop before). I will run Memtest more stringently.

Could you tell me what caused the most recent minidump crash (110807)??? The others are old news, this is a new error.

Thanks!!
*Jed

That minidump crashed with hardware and IP_MISALIGNED<This is usually caused through faulty hardware and can be any hardware.

FOLLOWUP_NAME: MachineOwner

SYMBOL_NAME: win32k!NtUserGetThreadState+136

IMAGE_NAME: hardware

DEBUG_FLR_IMAGE_TIMESTAMP: 0

STACK_COMMAND: .trap ffffffffed1ebcdc ; kb

MODULE_NAME: hardware

FAILURE_BUCKET_ID: IP_MISALIGNED

BUCKET_ID: IP_MISALIGNED

Followup: MachineOwner
---------

Regards Howard

thanks again for your help.

today we determined that the problem is indeed definitely hardware, and almost certainly the motherboard.
probably the on-board graphics processor, potentially the power management. something that doesn't run during safe mode (because in safe mode, it's just fine).

there doesn't seem to be anything to do about it, since the machine is past warranty. any mobo i could find for this model would undoubtedly be old, and sold as is, so there's no guarantee something wouldn't fry out in a week.


any last ideas?

any last words...besides RIP?