- Thread Author
-
- #1
it's a bit of a long story, but I have been battling the blue screen of death for months now on my machine.
My system specs are:
Dell Deminsion 8400 (really just the case and mobo are Dell OEM)
Antec 650w psu
Geforce 9600GT 512mb
western digital harddrive
4GB Crucial ballistix ram
Pentium 4 3.4GHz cpu (HT)
Intel (dell OEM) mobo
and recently installed Windows 7 Home 32bit
I had XP home on it before and I developed a blue screen that had the "PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGED_AREA" error message, and through my research, all sources suggest its faulty ram causing this. At the time, I had a 2 sets of ram sticks in, a pair of 512mb regular crucial sticks (533mhz) and a set of their ballistix sticks. I removed the regular set of sticks that left me with just the pair of ballistix sticks, and the error message went away for a few weeks (might have been a month or more) and then promptly returned.
By now, I wanted to see if the motherboard was at fault for frying ram sticks perhaps (I took a shot in the dark on that one, I'm no ace PC guru, but techicaly savvy, so I usually just dive in and get my hands dirty) and like a fool, I took it down to Geeksquad to do a diagnostic on the hardware. They only told me all my hardware was fine and it was Windows at fault.
So I thought "Great!, I've been wanting to upgrade to Windows 7, so here's a perfect opportunity!" and I purchased Windows 7 and another set of ballistix ram sticks to supplant the ones I lost before leaving me with the 4GB of 2 ballistix pairs of 1GB. Then I come home from work today and the PC screen is blue with that same page fault error message, so ofcourse my heart sank, but at the same time I knew that mean't it wasn't a software issue.....or is it?
I've checked, double checked, and triple checked the ram sticks, swapped them out in an effort to isolate the 2nd set of bad sticks (error message comes up no matter which sticks I have in), I've made sure the dimm slots were totally clean of dust and that the pins weren't damaged in any way, so now I'm at a loss at what to look at next
My system specs are:
Dell Deminsion 8400 (really just the case and mobo are Dell OEM)
Antec 650w psu
Geforce 9600GT 512mb
western digital harddrive
4GB Crucial ballistix ram
Pentium 4 3.4GHz cpu (HT)
Intel (dell OEM) mobo
and recently installed Windows 7 Home 32bit
I had XP home on it before and I developed a blue screen that had the "PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGED_AREA" error message, and through my research, all sources suggest its faulty ram causing this. At the time, I had a 2 sets of ram sticks in, a pair of 512mb regular crucial sticks (533mhz) and a set of their ballistix sticks. I removed the regular set of sticks that left me with just the pair of ballistix sticks, and the error message went away for a few weeks (might have been a month or more) and then promptly returned.
By now, I wanted to see if the motherboard was at fault for frying ram sticks perhaps (I took a shot in the dark on that one, I'm no ace PC guru, but techicaly savvy, so I usually just dive in and get my hands dirty) and like a fool, I took it down to Geeksquad to do a diagnostic on the hardware. They only told me all my hardware was fine and it was Windows at fault.
So I thought "Great!, I've been wanting to upgrade to Windows 7, so here's a perfect opportunity!" and I purchased Windows 7 and another set of ballistix ram sticks to supplant the ones I lost before leaving me with the 4GB of 2 ballistix pairs of 1GB. Then I come home from work today and the PC screen is blue with that same page fault error message, so ofcourse my heart sank, but at the same time I knew that mean't it wasn't a software issue.....or is it?
I've checked, double checked, and triple checked the ram sticks, swapped them out in an effort to isolate the 2nd set of bad sticks (error message comes up no matter which sticks I have in), I've made sure the dimm slots were totally clean of dust and that the pins weren't damaged in any way, so now I'm at a loss at what to look at next