Tired of this crap....

[red '00]

Thanks for the link, gave me some insight into just what the heck is going on.

Two questions,

How do I make sure all my drivers are valid for the hardware in my system?

And,

How do I "swap" memory or exchange RAM?

[arsenal]

To check if your drivers are valid:
Go to Start -> Control Panel -> System
Click on the Hardware tab
Click on the Device manager button
If anything is invalid, it should be displayed in here either with a yellow or red icon.
(Yellow being a yeild sign, red being a stop sign).
If anything there is yellow or red, right click on it, and cycle through the tabs, and see what information you can get.

Then try downloading and installing the correct drivers from the vendors website.


To swap out memory (RAM) is pretty easy. But if you don't feel comfortable doing it, you can take it BestBuy, CompuSmart, Futureshop etc, and have them do it for you.

Find out if your computer uses DDR, or SDIM ram. If it if a fairly new computer, it probably is DDR. Your computer manuel should be able to tell you what kind of RAM your motherboard uses.
Go buy some new RAM from memoryexpress (actually, they may be do it for you).
Turn your computer off, open the case up. And look for things that look like what you just bought. There will be white tabs at each end. They pull open pretty easily, take the old ram out. Put the new ram in, and make sure that the clips close from you pushing the ram in.

Hope that helps, if you have any other questions, let me know.

[photon]

Basically you need to go to the site for each of your components and download the latest driver for it. Motherboard (nVidia, VIA, SiS usually), video card, sound card, etc..

But this sounds a lot more like hardware to me.

To swap your system memory usually involves removing the RAM and putting in other RAM.

How much memory do you have, and how is it setup? Is it 1 or 2 DIMMs? (Your manual should show you where the memory is installed) If it's 2 DIMMs, you can most likely simply remove one of them and run the system with half memory. It'll run slower, but if your errors go away then you know that the one you took out is bad. (Remove one, then replace it with the one you removed to try each one idividually).

[Hack&Lube]

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL errors are generally resource allocation errors and could indicate faulty memory.

By the way, the minimum requirements for Windows XP is like 256MB and you only have 128MB...and it's SDRAM to boot (very old).

Ram is easy to pop out and replace, just click two tabs, but you'll have to find some SDRAM unless your board also supports DDR.

[red '00]

Hack&Lube - I wasn't aware of the minimum requirments for Windows XP in terms of RAM. When we purchased this computer a little over a year ago, it came with WinXP already installed on it. It was refurbished at a computer store where we bought it. Question now is, why would they install Windows XP when knowing it requires 256MB, and my computer not having that? It doesn't make much sense.

I'll have this little issue taken care of in due time, hopefully. Until then thanks for all the help and suggestions guys, gave me some insight into what was going on with my computer and I'm pretty sure made me aware of how to fix it. I'll try to remember to post an update after I get it fixed.

One last question though, can these continual crashes hurt my computer in any way? Or is it basically just a big pain in the testicles?

[Hack&Lube]

Originally posted by red '00@Aug 28 2005, 10:38 PM
Hack&Lube - I wasn't aware of the minimum requirments for Windows XP in terms of RAM. When we purchased this computer a little over a year ago, it came with WinXP already installed on it. It was refurbished at a computer store where we bought it. Question now is, why would they install Windows XP when knowing it requires 256MB, and my computer not having that? It doesn't make much sense.

I'll have this little issue taken care of in due time, hopefully. Until then thanks for all the help and suggestions guys, gave me some insight into what was going on with my computer and I'm pretty sure made me aware of how to fix it. I'll try to remember to post an update after I get it fixed.

One last question though, can these continual crashes hurt my computer in any way? Or is it basically just a big pain in the testicles?

No, these crashes can't hurt your computer. They are happening because your computer is already hurt in some way or in the best case, just badly configured.

128MB is the official minimum but you know that the minimum requirements on boxes are all false. All tech sites will tell you that 256MB is a more realistic minimum.

Unfortunately, your computer uses old SDRAM which is expensive. If it was using DDR (double data rate), you could get 512MB of ram for only $50 these days.

[red '00]

Alrighty. Thanks for all your help!

[Buff]

128MB of RAM is the minimum memory needed to run Windows XP:

XP System Requirements

XP will run better with 256MB of RAM though. Going by your system specs, it may not hurt to upgrade your memory, you should notice a difference, but it isn't guaranteed to solve your issues with crashing.

[red '00]

I'm going to upgrade my RAM as soon as I can. Unfortunetly I have to wait about three weeks before I have any solid money flow coming in again, but from what I could gather from this thread, a simple memory upgrade shouldn't cost too much anyway, so I can likely get that worked out this week or next.

Not that it's a big deal anyway. I don't do anything on this computer but listen to music, talk on MSN and post on CalgaryPuck and gostampsgo.com. It just gets annoying when you're in the middle of a song or you're making a post and the thing crashes on you.

[Flames_Gimp]

upgrading ram won't fix the problem. if it was my pc this is what i would do:

first try and remember if you changed anything before the crashing started.

then i would check device manager for any conflicts

then i would find a stick of ram that I know works and switch it to rule out the ram

reformat and reinstall windows, if that still doesn't solve the problem

then i would start changing around the hardware.