BSOD...Suggestions Please?

[Farrar]

I have a PC on our network that gives me a BSOD about twice per day. The PC is a Dell Precision 380 running XP Pro. This PC, and several more just like it, are in our Engineering department and are all configured the same. All of these boxes have an NVidia Quadro FX 1400 graphics card which was what I suspected to begin with. But I have tried these steps to no avail:

1. Swapped out the problem PCs video card with another, identical card, from another identical machine.
2. Reinstalled the drivers per the service tag number from Dell’s website.
3. Installed the software/drivers from NVidia’s site after the Dell recommended driver{s} did not work.

After begrudgingly deciding it could not be the video card, I then:

1. Did a System Restore going back 3 weeks.
2. Swapped out the memory thinking there might be a bad stick causing the problem.
3. Reset the BIOS

It usually takes about 2-3 hours from the time I am called to see the BSOD until it happens again.

What other steps might I take before just wiping this PC and starting over? I could have done a format / reinstall n 4 hours counting all those Windows updates, service packs, etc BUT I wanted to try to solve the problem 1st and am really not sure if this is not hardware related anyway.

Thanks for any help you might have. If I don’t solve this by quitting time tonight, I’ll just stay over and do a format / reinstall.

Thanks!

Jeff Farrar

[geoscomp]

What does the BSOD say?

[Farrar]

0x00000050: PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA.
I have read 5-6 MSKB articles and ran software for trojans, spyware, etc. with no luck.

Thank You,

Jeff

[geoscomp]

Have you run chkdsk /r from the recovery console? (instructions here: http://pirules3.14.googlepages.com/r...console_chkdsk )
This error can be caused by a lot of things such as bad memory, etc. but the easiest thing to check that causes it is to try and fix your ntfs file system if it is corrupt.

[Farrar]

I will go try that right now. Don't know why I did not think of that as I have used that several times in thye past just never with a blue screen.

Thanks....

Jeff