Vista Frequent BSOD

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First, I apologize in advance for the small novel I am about to write.

I am having an issue supporting the laptop that I purchased for my fiance back in October of 2007.

I bought her a Dell Inspiron 1721 which came with Windows Vista Home Edition, I know next to nothing about this OS.

In May 2008 (I'm not sure exactly of the date) the computer began to blue screen at random. This problem occurred once or twice a week. Checked for Viruses, Spyware, other malware but found nothing.

I took note that I had only purchses 1gb worth of RAM (why is beyond me), so my immediate thought was this could be causing the issue as I have been told Vista requires a minimum of 2gb RAM to run properly.

I purchased 4gb RAM from Dell around July 4th and installed it, since I installed the new RAM the blue screen has been happening at least once per day and its driving me up the wall (well, she is drving me up the wall about it).

I thought maybe the RAM was faulty so I ran MemTest86 on it, watched it for a few hours with no error and then left it running overnight, on errors found when I checked again in the morning.

I looked around some forums (this one included) and noted people having compatibility issues with Norton Internet Security on Vista, it was causing simila crashes. I went ahead and uninstalled Norton and installed Avast, that did not fix the issue.

Called Dell tech support (joy), and ran some diagnostics with the tech on the phone. Win debug showed that the issue was hardware related so we ran a hardware test (via Fn key held down at startup), no issues found.

Reliability monitor showed that the issue may be related to google toolbar so we removed that in hopes it would fix the issue. This was done last night (July 26th) and today it has blue screened twice.

Attached you will find 3 files:

Zip file of the Minidumps that have occured within the last few days.

Text file containing the text of the windows startup popup after one of today's dumps.

Screenshot of the Dxdiag. (I don't know, someone said it might help to display this too)

Thank you in advance for your assistance.
 
List Of Errors
0x8E (Twice) - Correct about Hardware, Is Normally a Hardware error, quite often RAM.
0x7F (Twice) - Generally caused by Hardware or Software, Hardware being the most common and Memory being the common Hardware (Including RAM, L2 Cache and Video RAM).
0x50 - Quite similar to 0x7F except Software is more general caused by Anti-Virus Software.
0x124 - Something to do with Processors, i have no more info on this error apart from that

Seems overall something to do with Memory on the system be it RAM, L2 Cache, Cache on HDD or Video RAM.
I have a suspicion that the CPU may be faulty, try running Prime95. This will detect a error in a matter of minutes.

OS 32bit Version - http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=103
OS 64bit Version - http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=205
 
Thanks

Thank you!

I downloaded the Prime and ran it, it appears to have found something but I have no idea what. I have attached a screenshot of the program.

It said to consult a stress.txt file but i cant find one on my PC. When searching for stress.txt using the PC search feature I found two files:

results.txt

it contained this:

[Thu Jul 31 14:48:18 2008]
FATAL ERROR: Rounding was 0.4990234375, expected less than 0.4
Hardware failure detected, consult stress.txt file.
FATAL ERROR: Rounding was 0.48828125, expected less than 0.4
Hardware failure detected, consult stress.txt file.
Compare your results to other computers at

AMD Turion(tm) 64 X2 Mobile Technology TL-60
CPU speed: 798.25 MHz, 2 cores
CPU features: RDTSC, CMOV, Prefetch, 3DNow!, MMX, SSE, SSE2
L1 cache size: 64 KB
L2 cache size: 512 KB
L1 cache line size: 64 bytes
L2 cache line size: 64 bytes
L1 TLBS: 32
L2 TLBS: 512
Prime95 32-bit version 25.6, RdtscTiming=1
Best time for 768K FFT length: 38.208 ms.
Best time for 896K FFT length: 46.083 ms.
Best time for 1024K FFT length: 51.363 ms.
Best time for 1280K FFT length: 65.307 ms.
Best time for 1536K FFT length: 79.813 ms.
Best time for 1792K FFT length: 96.708 ms.


and prime.txt, which contained this:

V24OptionsConverted=1
SendAllFactorData=1
StressTester=1
UsePrimenet=0
MinTortureFFT=8
MaxTortureFFT=4096
TortureMem=875
TortureTime=15

[PrimeNet]
Debug=1



Thank again for your help!
 
What test were you running?

I'm guessing "Large FFT's" from the screenshot if so you need to run the other tests "Small FFT's" for CPU and "Blend" mainly for RAM, since that Large FFT's runs a bit of both the RAM and CPU (50-50).
 
No Error, Still Problems

I ran the small FFT as suggested and it did not report any errors this time. However, the computer blue screened again just a few moments ago. That makes twice today.

I have attached today's minidumps.

I'm at a loss for what to do.
 
Did you make a conclusion from what i said before, since the Small FFT's test didn't find a error your CPU is ok.
This means your RAM is faulty, this also proves yet again that bad RAM can pass memtest86, this is the third time this week i've seen Bad RAM pass Memtest on this forum. Now you need to replace your RAM or get it replaced since it will be under warranty when you bought that RAM earlier this month.

Also your MiniDumps you posted are both 0x8E errors and 1 cites Memory Corruption.
 
I'll try it...

I'll try replacing since it is under warranty.

My main concern is that it was Blue Screening prior to purchasing and installing the new RAM and though it is possible, it is unlikely that I have two bad sets of RAM.

For now I'll put this on hold and pick it back up once I have the new RAM, I appreciate the tool however seeing as MemTest86 appears to be junk.

Cheers.
 
Well Memtest86 isn't junk but i'm losing a bit of confidence in it now because Prime95 seems to always find the RAM or CPU is faulty when Memtest86 doesn't this seems to happen because it is less tolerant of errors in the hardware, Prime95 wasn't even produced for hardware testing it was produced to work out Mersenne Primes (i think about 43 or 44 have been found currently).
 
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