I have a Dell Inspiron laptop with window 8.1. I have not installed any new hardware or software. Just a few minutes ago, I got a blue screen, with the message:
Driver IRQL Not less or equal.
The message said that my system would restart automatically, and it did with no problem. What was the error message about?
It means that a kernel level device driver attempted to access pageable memory at an IRQL that was too high. In plain english, the driver f***ed up and tried to access memory that it shouldn’t have.
This can be a problem with the device driver itself, so downloading the latest drivers may fix it.
More often, it’s actually a memory or a disk problem, and the driver code ends up getting mucked up by the data corruption. Reseating the RAM and/or CPU can sometimes fix problems like this as they may be caused by things working loose (due to things like vibration from people walking by the computer, for example) rather than the hardware actually failing.
Another possible cause is static discharge corrupting memory, which is more likely to happen in winter months due to the lower humidity.
If it’s a one time thing I probably wouldn’t worry about it too much, but this may be a good time to back up all of your files just in case. If it keeps happening there’s a good chance that you’ve got a piece of hardware (RAM, CPU, motherboard, disk drive) that is starting to fail.
I got this on my system. Either the OS was corrupted or more likely the HD was dying. A replacement and fresh install fixed it. I did not get much help with google. Try to isolate if a part is going.
I have a 4+ year-old Dell laptop with Win7 Pro which crashes like this about once a week and has done so for over a year. It most frequently occurs during a [resume from sleep] operation, normally while the system attempts to play the happy wake-up sound. Which is often corrupted into a nasty digital buzz just as it crashes.
I’m a developer, but not at that deep OS level. A dump analyser always puts the failure at the same address in NTOSKRNL.dll. I interpret the failure as more likely a bad driver which leaves garbage which eventually trips NTOSKRNL rather than a fault within NTOSKRNL itself.
All drivers have been checked and updated as necessary. Both disk & RAM aren’t throwing errors. Google is uninformative about that address. As is Windows error reporting.
And yes, the machine is fully & automatically backed up.
I’m not really asking for advice, more just providing an anecdote FWIW to anyone. Although advice is welcome.
Thanks everyone. This computer is about 2 years old. I’ll check to see that all drivers are updated, but otherwise I won’t worry too much about it. I have nothing stored on this laptop (files, docs, pics) that I’m worried about losing.