Hopefully this is the right forum:

A good lot of times the last few weeks I've gotten a blue screen, usually when I try connect to the internet that says something about a hardware error and that it is dumping memory. (Sorry I haven't written down exaclty what it says.) It usually tells me that if it happens again I should contact the vendor. When I restart it sends an error report and that tells me that it doesn't know what it is but that it's probably a driver or something like that that isn't agreeing with my computer. I can't think of anything that I have installed lately that might do that, I haven't been installing much lately as my hard drive is getting a bit full.

earlier on today out of nowhere (also while on the net suspiciously...) i got another blue screen that just said something about Parity Check / Memory Parity Check.

I'm running Windows XP SE.

Any suggestions? Getting a bit worried. Thanks!

Sounds like you have a memory error so I'd recommend downloading a copy of MemTest86 and running that repeatedly overnight to check the memory for errors.

Alternatively, it could be a hardware driver error but the fact that the most recent message is referring to a memory parity check, it does seem to be memory-related.

You could check for any available Microsoft-approved driver updates by running Windows Update (there's a separate section in the results list for any new drivers that it detects).

Blue screen errors - also referred to as "Blue Screen Of Death" (BSOD) - do contain an error number that means something. The error number comes in 3 parts normally and will contain a code such as 0x0000F. That code number refers to the type of problem that has generated the error. Sometimes, that will be as specific as telling us that there's definitely a graphics card problem or definitely a memory problem. Often, though, it just tells us that the problem is in a driver or memory and we'll have to work out which one by ourselves! The next time that you get a BSOD (if you do still get one after running MemTest86 to check the memory), write down the full error code so that we can help you to identify the cause

Wowness! Thanks so much, I'll get that thing and see how it goes over the next few days. And hopefully, I won't be back for a while!

Well, if it does help you indentify and resolve the issue, just pop back to let us know so that we can close the thread off - thanks !!

Well, I haven't managed to run MemTest, it doesn't seem to be booting properly, I'm probably donig it wrong and I'll have another go later.

Just to update, I got another just when I was trying to connect there. It was the driver one and I got "DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL". Also *one* of the values that it was coming up with was 0xEF7B90F1 and it said something about musbta2k.sys...

Don't know if this means anything to anyone, but from the looks of things I have more problems than just with memory...

That error number doesn't return any information whatsoever in a Google search. However, the filename does. Do you have a D-Link USB ISDN terminal adaptor (modem) ? If you do, that seems to be the cause of the problem, which does tie up with the fact that you mentioned connecting to the Internet to be a time at which the error often occurs.

Yes we do, so ... what do I do about it? :s

1. Try to get a newer driver for it. Uninstall the ISDN adaptor and re-install it using the latest driver. Alternatively, if you've installed a newer driver already, uninstall the ISDN adaptor and re-install it with the original version of the driver from the installation CD / disk.

2. If that doesn't help, you'll need to uninstall the ISDN adaptor completely and see whether it's OK over the next couple of days. Unfortunately, as the problem tends to occur when you connect to the Internet, you'll need to use an alternative means of connecting to the Internet - either a different ISDN adaptor or a dial-up analogue modem.