There is something seriously wrong with my computer...HELP!

General Questions
#1

Yeah, so my desktop PC (an Athlon XP 1800 runnign win XP) never stops crashing. I can’t seem to do anything even remotely CPU intensive (such as run anti-virus.) It crashes, blue screen and everything. The blue error message doesn’t even seem to be consistant, once I got no actual message, just:

STOP Ox0000008E (0x00000001, 0x8052EC54, 0xF25189B1, 0x00000000)

Another time I got,

PAGE_FAULT_IF_NONPAGED_AREA_

STOP: 0x00000050 (0xFFFFFFAA, 0x00000001, 0x81FBA733, 0x00000000)

In addition, my Norton Firewall seems to be blocking and allowing an awful lot of traffic. On normal startup (me not opening up anything,) over 100 things were blocked and over 100 allowed, plus, I got warnings because it blocked a trojan three times.

I reformatted a few months ago, but apparantly that did nothing. I really hope it’s not a hardware problem. I don’t think my CPU is overheating, it has a fairly nice heatsink, and I don’t overclock it at all. I have 512 MB of RAM, so that shouldn’t be it. Even if I just leave it on not doing anything but running AIM, it will crash within an hour, usually.

#2

STOP: 0x00000050

Couldn’t find anything on Ox0000008E. Did you mistype it?

#3

Don’t know if this will help, but I had a similiar problem after rebuilding one of my computers – random blue screen errors. After I turned off the caching and shadowing it stopped. Not really my area of expertise, but it’s quick and easy to try.

#4

Ah, you typed an O instead of a 0. According to this it could be a bad memory issue. Last guy seems to know his stuff.

#5

Definately a memory management problem. (that’s “page fault in nonpaged area”, for anyone googling)

If I swap something out of RAM to disk (aka virtual mem, aka the page file), it’s been “paged to disk”. If I try to request that location, it triggers a page fault, meaning the OS has to go read that information back into RAM.
An “invalid page fault” is normally happens when the page file is accessed, but in a location that doesn’t map to anything. That’s bad. Your error appears to be this, or a variation on the theme.
As in Q.E.D’s link, it might be bad ram, or something overheating. I’m guessing your RAM is in two 256M sticks. Try removing one, then the other, and see if things improve/get worse.

#6

Try turning off your virtual memory, and see how that works. And if its bad RAM, well a 512 Megs stick runs about ~$70 these days, so it could be worse.

#7

OK, so I will first try turning off virtual memory, if that’s a big no go, then I guess replacing RAM is in order? I don’t need to buy another stick, this one came with a lifetime warrenty, at last, something good.

#8

At download.com you can find a free RAM tester, probably several of them.

#9

Yup, tested the RAM, mucho errors. So, now I have to find my damn original invoice to send it back…and I think I threw that away…