BSOD's on XP MCE

[TDGuy]

Hi Guys,

1st post here but I've been combing the forum for a while looking for answers. If someone can help me I promise I will post which solution resolved the problem.

I've got a Dell dimension e510, 1 GB of memory win xp media center edition. Only addition to the stock machine is a Radeon x700 video card.

I've been getting the BSOD for months now and cannot figure it out. I've run both memtest and windows memory diag for a few days with no errors. Have run a disk check as well. Tried running with just 2 mem chips at a time and still get BSOD's.

Have found Dell has a BIOS upgrade for the chipset--installing this doesn't seem to help.

Hoped a rebuild would help so I moved all my data off and tried the Dell system restore which seems to just blast the drive and drop a fresh image on it. The BSOD's keep coming so I can only assume it is hardware at this point.

I found ATI released some new video drivers for MCE a couple weeks ago so I tried installing them yesterday. Hopefully this will work but given my track record so far I'm not holding out much hope.

In the meantime, I do have a nice collection of minidumps that I was hoping some of the folks here could take a peek at and offer some advice? It would be much appreciated!

 

[peterdiva]

I think you've got a RAM problem. One of the dumps has crashed with bugcheck 1A, and this is asign of faulty RAM. Another dump has crashed with registry corruption, and this can be caused by faulty RAM. How many sticks of RAM have you got? Try running with just one at a time. And memory testers aren't perfect.

 

[TDGuy]

I was afraid that would be the case. I've got 4 256MB sticks. Do you have to have at least two in the MOBO?

It was suggested to me that it could be the motherboard as well.

 

[peterdiva]

No, you don't have to have two in at a time. The problem with only having one is that it's only 256MB, but it's the only way to see if you have a bad stick. It could also be a memory slot, so you can try one stick at a time in another slot.