[joister]

Hello , this is my first post on geeks to go and would be very appreciative of any light anyone can shed on my problem.

I've recently bought a brand new PC from a private computer shop (P4 3GHz, 512Mb DDR, 80Gb HD) and as soon as I turned it on I pushed in my Windows XP and started setup. All went well for about 10mins till it freezed. I restarted it and similar things happened. The computer either freezed or a blue screen came up and said

"A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer

DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL"

(capital letters blurb changed to other equally unintelligable things on different attempts)

I kept repartitioning and formating the system as the time of freezing seemed to be random and eventually the whole setup completed the way through and windows started. Great I thought..

Sadly, as soon as I started a setup for another program (Norton Antivirus) it spontaneously restarted. Spontaneous restarting became a bit of a recurring theme in Win XP whenever I put the machine under any stress. :mad:

Not to give in easily, I reformatted and tried my old copy of win 98. It installed more smoothly (only second attempt) and loaded. This time instead of restarting it has a habit of either freezing or having OE exceptional errors (blue screen) forcing me to restart.

Having exhausted possible software faults I'm pretty sure its the hardware. Just not knowledgeable enough to put the blame on a particular component. My ignorance points me at some dodgy RAM (seems to be a little damage on two of the pins). Could this be the problem if not any suggestions would be very welcome.

Thanks for reading, and any assistance. joister

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Hi'

most of the time when a os won't load its bad ram, you can test it with memtest86, its free and you don't need a os installed to run memtest.

Let memtest run for at least 3 passes any errors then thats the problem if it makes it thru the 3 passes without any errors the let it run for 5 or 6 hours just to be sure.

With the error you listed it most likly is the ram

If memtest doesn't show errors the trouble shoot the psu.

Rick

[Doby]

Hi'

most of the time when a os won't load its bad ram, you can test it with memtest86, its free and you don't need a os installed to run memtest.

Let memtest run for at least 3 passes any errors then thats the problem if it makes it thru the 3 passes without any errors the let it run for 5 or 6 hours just to be sure.

With the error you listed it most likly is the ram

If memtest doesn't show errors the trouble shoot the psu.

Rick

[joister]

Hi,

thanks very much for the reply. I downloaded the memtest86 and it picked up 28393 errors on the first pass! Will take this back to the shop. thanks again for the good advice.

Joister.

[Doby]

Thats your problem then

your wecome

Rick