Intermittent bugchecks, various causes

[jonathanv]

My parents' machine (windows 7, custom built, quite new) is giving intermittent restarts due to bugchecks. I have installed WinDbg and looked at the minidumps but they are all over the place. I have reseated the memory and run memtest for a day but it doesn't show any issues.

I am tempted to replace the memory or CPU but I would value your input before investing in new hardware. I have attached the latest minidumps so you can see what's happening. I have more, around 50 over a period of 5 months. Any help would be appreciated.

- Jonathan

 

[Mark56]

These are a mixed bag of dump files but there sre some pointers to the hard drive. Run the diagnostics following the guide below.

Also try running the PC on just one stick of RAM at a time and then swap if the problem persists. Memtest can miss minor faults.

Identify the make of your hard drive and then use one of the links below to get the manufacturers diagnostic for ISO CD. Burn the image file to a CD, boot the PC with the disc in the drive and run the diagnostics. You first need to set the CD drive to 1st in the boot order in the Bios setup.

If you do not have an image burner use this free software to make the CD.

http://www.isoimageburner.com/


ExcelStor: http://www.excelstor.com/eng/support.php?sub_id=3

Hitachi/IBM: http://www.hitachigst.com/support/downloads/

Samsung: http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/support/downloads/support_in_es.html

Toshiba Fujitsu: http://sdd.toshiba.com/main.aspx?Path=SoftwareUtilities#diagnostic

Seagate, Maxtor & Quantum:http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads

Western Digital:http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?lang=en

 

[jonathanv]

Okay so it did turn out the be the memory. Although I had memtest running for a full day and night, one of the two modules turned out the be the issue. It would boot fine with one module in slot 1, but with the other in the same slot it wouldn't even boot.

So many thanks for that last recommendation!

 

[Mark56]

Glad you found the problem, too many people believe in Memtest but on quite a few ocassions i have seen it miss something.