Blue screen errors, please help before I kick it!!Follow

Hey guys, I just built a new PC, the specs are:

ASUS P5WD2 Premium Motherboard
Intel Pentium 4 3.2 Ghz 800FSB
2Gb DDR2 PC533 RAM
GeCube Radeon X700 256Mb (PCI Express)


After building it, it ran fine, windows XP install was normal. I imediatly installed Service pack 1 and 2 and all drivers. Worked fine for a week or two and ran Doom 3 with no lag on full graphics quality.

I have been playing Star Wars: KOTOR 2 on it, also with no problems. Until the game crashed and exited to desktop. I restarted the game and had horrible graphical glitches, and after about 5 seconds it crashed, this time restarting the PC.
Ever since then, I cannot turn the PC on without a blue screen 3 seconds after booting to windows desktop. They range from "page fault in nonpaged area" to "irq not less or equal" errors.

I am SO PISSED OFF, so please, ANYONE help me!

Yea, its still under full warranty. I'll take it back to the shop if I cant fix it myself. Thanx 4 the reply.

Run dumpchk! Windows XP gives you quite a few wonderful tools that you can load from the Support Tools directory on the Win XP CD. OK looking into a dump file is way beyond the technical capability of most users, but if you do an a nack for the uber technical you may find this a very educational experience. In the System control panel applet - Advanced tab - Startup and Recovey Options button you will note the type of dump file that is being created. By default it is the "minidump" which is around 64K in size and located in c:\windows\minidump. These files from a support perspective are pure gold.

When a CPU encounters a stop error by default it will log all information in the "offending" area of memory out to a debug file (dump file). There are three types of dump files: mini dump, kernel dump, and full dump. Mini dump is the smallest, while full dump will place onto disk the entire contents of memory at the time the stop error occured. With a full dump file if you have 2GB of RAM the size of the dump will be 2GB. Make sure you have the disk space if you use a full dump.

There are various developer utilities to look into these dump files and see exactly what happened at the time of the stop error. The easist tool to use is a command line utility called dumpchk which is included in the Support Tools (this can also be downloaded from Microsoft's website). Armed with dumpchk and a dump file you can see the type of stop error that occured, the memory region where the error was detected, and the hex values of each driver and executable in the neighboring memory regions. There are a couple of good articles on Technet (http://www.microsoft.com/technet) that explain how to read the contents of a dump file and what the stop errors mean.

For more serious debugging you can use the developers kits to look at the dump files as long as you have the symbol files installed on your computer. The symbol files can be huge and really are meant for very serious developers and driver programmers. If you get to this point normally I open a support call with Microsoft, give them the dump file, and have them tell you what is wrong. The support calls are not cheap, but when you give Microsoft the necessary information it is amazing how quickly they can identify a problem. For me the $100 is definitely worth the 1-2 hours digging into a dump file. For work my time is definitely worth the lost productivity and I gladly pay for the support call.