Would appreciate mindump asisstance

I believe you have a ram problem, as most of your minidumps are crashing with memory corruption.

Go HERE and follow the instructions.

Some faulty ram can pass memtest.

Regards Howard

Thanks for the reply Howard.
What I will do is before I go to bed I will yank 1 of the 2 DIMM's and let it run overnight and(strangely enough) hope for a crash.If I don't get one in 24 hours I will switch with the other DIMM(and REALLY hope for a crash).
You said most of the indications were RAM.What else reared it's ugly head?

When your computer crashes due to faulty ram, it can, and does throw up errors for other stuff as well. So that`s why I think you have a ram problem.

Regards Howard

OK-Thanks Howard.It hasn't crashed in 23 hours now.I did a little tinkering last night(Saturday) so I think I'll let it run as is overnight and see what happens.Last night I lost my audio somehow and had to uninstall and reinstall the realmedia codecs.I did this by uninstalling/reinstalling realalternative.Apparantly it was causing the wave volumn slider on my AC97 audio equalizer display to drop all the way down to zero.This was happening even with xvid files and MP3's.I'm not only not sure what caused it ,I am not even sure how I figured it out.But maybe that was what was causing it.Like I said I'll let it run as is overnight before I start swapping RAM.

Edit- I guess if the RAM was faulty it could have corrupted realalternative-which I was using(actually Media Player Classic) a lot the last few days.

Still no crash.Originally I had (3 ) 256DIMM"s in there but one failed memtest86 the day I fired the machine up for the first time and I yanked it.I'm wondering if that corrupt stick could have zapped a driver or something somewhere and I accidently fixed it with my carpet bomb approach.(Try this,oh that didn't work now try this ,maybe I'll try this,I wonder what will happen if I ..............etc)

Yes, judging by your dumps, memory is to blame.

Don't forget that all 3 sticks may work 100% perfectly alone, but when put together can cause errors if they are not compatible with each other.

You can also get memory errors from having memory installed which is not compatible with your system, as you can imagine. So it doesn't necessarily mean one your sticks is bad.. Just maybe not compatible.

Still no crash running on 1 256 stick.I have a 512 on the way from a Kbyte RMA,so I guess I'll just wait on that.Thanks for the advice guys.

I seem to still have a problem.It is not crashing nearly as often but it is still happening.I have been using a new Kbyte 512MB 2700 DIMM.
Do these latest minidumps mean anything to the gurus?

Two of your minidumps crash with memory corruption, and a bugcheck of 8E.

0x0000008E: KERNEL_MODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED

A kernel mode program generated an exception which the error handler didn’t catch. These are nearly always hardware compatibility issues (which sometimes means a driver issue or a need for a BIOS upgrade).

One minidump crashes with a hardware error, and a bugcheck of 0A.

0x0000000A: IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

Typically due to a bad driver, or faulty or incompatible hardware or software. Technically, this error condition means that a kernel-mode process or driver tried to access a memory location to which it did not have permission, or at a kernel Interrupt ReQuest Level (IRQL) that was too high. (A kernel-mode process can access only other processes that have an IRQL lower than, or equal to, its own.)

Regards Howard

All the hardware is either new or has been swapped for a known good part.
Howard,your post adds to my growing suspicion of the software.I am not getting random reboots in the middle of the night anymore after installing the new RAM.The last 2 times it crashed I was in the process of moving large(gigs)files while doing other processor intensive tasks.(Like emule and Azureus at the same time with an occasional touch of Newsleecher)Could I just be overtaxing my system?The 512MB L2 cache on my Athlon3000xp rocks,I am used to having to wait on my old systems and maybe I am pushing the envelope to far and the system just can't handle it.
Is that an actual possiblity?
I'm going to think about this for a bit.Before I start trying to track down driver conflicts and flaky software I am leaning towards running debian exclusively for a day or so as I have only had noticed problems while running XP,which is 90% of the time.
So-is it possible I am asking to much of my basically new system?

EDIT--BTW I have been trying to get a good explanation of
0x000xxxxx: IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
for a loooooong time.Seperate thanks for that.

Still no crash running on 1 256 stick.I have a 512 on the way from a Kbyte RMA,so I guess I'll just wait on that.Thanks for the advice guys.

Click to expand...

It seems strange that you got no crashes when using the 256mb stick of ram. Now you have started using the new 512mb stick of ram the crashes are back.

I can only conclude that your ram is either faulty of incompatible with your system.

Regards Howard

Thanks.Looks like it's going to be a lot of trial and ereror.The 512 I have in there now is not the DIMM I was waiting on.It is a KByte I got for $49 at staples because I didn't want to wait on my RMA shipment.When the one I am waiting on gets here I'll have more troubleshooting options.I still think I might just be running to many progs at once,maybe when I try a 2x512 configuration it'll resolve itself.Thanks again.

After a week with no crashs it looks like all is well.Thanks for all the good advice.It looks like it was indeed the RAM.I was trying a little to hard and probaly got mixed up when I was swapping all the old RAM I could find.Now I have a matched pair of new 512 kbytes and no problems.Thanks again Howard and others. :wave: