For the past six months or so of running Vista I’ve had a few memory issues, but nothing more than minor annoyances until last night. My weekly friday night raid was getting set to head down to the balrog in Lotro (Exciting Friday night, I know) but, as we were getting set up, my system’s memory usage jumped to 98% - something that’s never happened before - I shut down the game and tried rebooting my computer.
A few minutes after rebooting I was greeted with a blue screen and an HD cache dump before my computer reset itself.
So, I updated Spybot, Adaware and AVG to the newest definitions and ran all three, or tried anyway. Spybot and AVG didn’t find anything but Adaware seems to hang up at around 56k items scanned every time I run it yielding a system error. I’ve run hijackthis but I’m not comfortable parsing the data to see if there’s something I missed.
The core of my current setup is:
E6750 2.66G
MB GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3R 775
MEM 1Gx2|COR TWIN2X2048-6400C5DHX R
VGA XFX PVT80GTHF4 8800GTS 640MB R
HD 250G|WD 7K 16M SATA2 WD2500KS
Any thoughts? Or would it help if I posted the hijackthis log?
Your system setup’s not that far off mine (I’ve Vista Home Premium); if you have or can borrow a second monitor, the simplest way is to have Task Manager set up to display on the second monitor. Then you can dynamically see what’s causing the huge memory usage.
You say you had a BSOD: what was the STOP error? It should be in the System Event log.
Have you run any kind of memory (RAM) test? Maybe one of your memory chips developed a problem. Or maybe (shooting or the cheapest solution) one’s just a little loose, and reseting it would help.
Vista and XP have all sorts of disk etc. housekeeping stuff that runs in the background as deep OS functions that are not normally visible in task manager as discrete tasks, which can cause resource spikes.
If the system is blue screening and scans are getting jammed I would normally suspect an incipient disk media corruption issue ahead of anything else including malware and viruses. In my experience disk media corruption tends to be a progressive problem that accelerates with use, If you can boot into safe mode I would back up any critical data NOW before proceeding with any other attempted scans or fixes.
I’ve since backed up everyone important / music onto my external harddrive.
In the mean-time some further investigation and another two BSODs has yielded the error message “process has locked pages” during the BSOD and the screen moves by so quickly I’ve not had time to pull any more information off of it.
However, looking into that error along with my os and hardware it appears that there might be some driver conflicts between my nvidia video card and my sound blaster sound card which is causing the problem.
My question is, I’ve never had this problem before and haven’t updated my video drivers in some time. If it is a driver conflict which I’m leaning towards at this point, why would it manifest itself now? When I have had the same drivers installed for weeks?
After backing up my hard drive, I installed the most recent Nvidia and Soundblaster drivers and have had one BSOD since doing so.
Any suggestions on where to go from here? I’ll see about testing the ram here shortly.
You might want to check your BIOS (or reset it to Factory Default state) to make sure no IRQs or memory addresses are being locked. Unless the SB or Nvdia cards are pretty long in the tooth agewise, most modern cards in XP and Vista machines generally don’t step (that often) on each other’s memory addresses.
Much like XP, you can disable the “automatic restart on system fail”
Start — R click on computer ---- properties ---- advanced tab — uncheck “automatic restart”
This should stop your machine on the BSOD and allow you to extract more specific error data.
You can go here http://www.memtest.org/ to download a variety of formats for Memtest. Burn to cd or make a floppy and boot to that cd or floppy. If you see red, you probably have a bad stick of ram. If you have more than one, try pulling one out at a time and retesting (shut off puter, and make sure you touch the case to dissipate any static charge before touching ram).