For about the past two or three weeks, my computer has been experiencing a serious problem. When I start it up, it boots up normally, but then maybe 3-10 minutes later it crashes. For a while, the screen would just lock up and the mouse, keyboard, etc. would become totally unresponsive, forcing me to hard reboot. Lately, though, it actually crashes to the blue screen of death with error message IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL.
If the computer goes more than 10 minutes or so without crashing, it does not crash for the rest of the day. (That is to say, it crashes shortly after booting or not at all.)
The computer usually only crashes on a cold boot. Once I restart it, it typically is OK (though on one occasion it continued to crash even after the initial reboot--it took four restarts to get it to work on that occasion).
Occasionally the computer won't crash even on its initial cold boot.
I've used MSConfig to disable all startup processes, but this has not stopped the crashing (though this change did coincide with the change in the crash going from lockup to blue screen).
The specific error code is STOP 0x0000000A followed by a list of hexadecimal numbers in parentheses. I wrote down those numbers. Is there some way to figure out what devices/programs/etc to which they correspond?
I know that this error comes from Windows trying to access forbidden memory, but I can't figure out whether it is a hardware failure, a bad device driver, a corrupted program, or something else entirely that is to blame. I hope the specifics of my problem can help you narrow it down for me.
Thanks so much!
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