Thread: Blue screen of Damnitalltohell

So my machine has begun blue screening while playing BF2. I downloaded the debugger :

Tonights was "probably caused by : PnkBstrK.sys ( PnkBstrK+1674d )"
The one several days prior was portcls.sys.
The one several days prior was "Probably caused by : memory_corruption"

So the pattern I am seeing doesn't appear to be caused by a specific driver. I believe the blue screens began shortly after a botched attempt at the latest NVIDIA driver, but I have since uninstalled and reinstalled.

I plan on doing some mem tests next weekend.

The point of the post is to ask what any gurus think, and also whether or not anyone is a stud at debugging memory dumps. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Have you continued to try to get the driver, or did you just do it once and it blew up after that try? I'm certain you've tried soft/hard rebooting by now, but did that make any apparent difference in the screens?

To my knowledge, there is no way to recover corrupted memory.

Although the driver seems to be the change factor here, the different dumps appear give a different reason every time.

I turned off the auto reboot option, so next time I hope to actually get a decent glance at it.

Interpreting memory dumps is not an art I am skilled in, I am searching for someone who is better at it than I am.

Odd, proabably a red herring, but I got kicked off the BF2 server about 5 minutes into the game for no reason last night.

I know there was a significant PB update on July 3rd that fixed the kicks that were going on.

I updated my client last night and will see.

After that I will pursue the mem test.

Every BSOD problem I've had in the last several years now has ultimately been bad memory. These days, pure software/connectivity/MS-BS tends to just CTD or freeze. BSOD's, IMO, are bad hardware. And bad memory often gives random-looking, unpredictable error messages because the computer doesn't know exactly what's wrong- bits getting over-written, dropped, or otherwise corrupted can easily look like problems with whatever process was trying to run, rather than the *root cause* memory problem.

Run checkdisk to clean that up, then run your memory diagnostic checks. If the diagnostic catches it, you should be able to isolate it to the particular stick(s) by pulling two out, checking your memory again, see if the problem is still there. Obviously if you have 4 sticks it takes a little swapping around to nail down the bad actors. With two sticks, it's quick.

Bad memory. Spent the time to properly troubleshoot it tonight and found the bad DIMM.

Whew.

Got some more memory today. Forced me to do some reading on how dual channel memory works.

We'll see how it goes. Any opinions on the difference between running 4x1GB Dimms VS 2X2GB Dimms?

I have them set up properly in Channel A-Slot0 and Channel B Slot0, so they are working in dual channel mode.