Cados Evilsbane

We all have our blue screen horror stories. I realize there's no magic cure for this problem, but I want to know if anyone has any suggestions on why this just happened to me and how I can prevent it in the future. Here's the situation:

In February I built my Dad a new PC. The relevant specs are as follows:

ASUS P4C800 Deluxe mobo
P4 3.2 GHz HT CPU
Win XP Pro SP1
120 GB PATA Maxtor HD
1024 MB DDR400 Corsair RAM
GeForce2 Ti 500 (yeah I know, it's not like he does any gaming, though)
430-Watt PSU

Now a couple days ago, out of the blue, he starts it up and bam.. blue screen of death. Now why on earth would this have happened? It's not a huge problem to get it all set up again, but it just leaves me wondering why this would happen to all this new hardware after only a few months (and it's not something I want to fix all the time). No new hardware was added before the crash and nothing was done to it (that I know of) that would promote a bluescreen. My hunch is that Maxtor just sucks, but hopefully not that bad. A brother of mine had already bought that part for him, otherwise I would have used a Western Digital or Seagate. Any suggestions to help me avoid this problem again?

P.S. This just enforces my love for AMD-based systems even further . Why I strayed away from them for this system, I know not.

EDIT: ANSWER FOUND. FOR MORE INFO, SCROLL DOWN TO LOWEST POST.

__________________

Palimax Sceleris

It would help a lot if you told us what STOP error at the top of the bluescreen was.

Cados Evilsbane

Sorry, forgot to mention that. I believe it said something like "PAGE_FAULT_ERROR_something".

__________________

Palarran

Mine seem to have been heat related issue (being summer and all), or from bad BIOS settings.

Checking your memory would be a good first step: http://www.memtest86.com
Note that if errors turn up they may not necessarily mean that your memory is bad; it could be a symptom rather than the problem itself.

Trakeen

I'm gonna go with the fact that you're using a Maxtor hard drive.. I'm not really sure how their newer drives perform, but my past experience with Maxtor has not been pleasurable. I bought a 20gig 7200rpm when they first came out, and 15 days later it kept blue screening and the hard drive made a lovely clicking noise. I got it replaced, bought it from best buy. 5 days later the exact same problem. I called Maxtor and talked to their techs for a few hours and they decided to send me a replacement hard drive from their manufacturer. It got here and within a month I was having the same problems.

Like I said, I'm not too familiar with the performance of their new drives, but based on past experience Maxtor can blow Buyza

Sumamael

I guess two possible causes as mentioned before:

A: overheating. Try to remove the case cover for a while

B: HDD problems. You can try disabling virtual memory and see what happens, 1GB normal memory should be enough for basics till you figure out whats up.

But yea, you can test the memory modules as well, just in case.

__________________
The active priest
The retired cleric
The sold necro

Akom of Cazic Thule

Not all bluescreens are cause by hardware though. Could very well be software corruption.

Then again, software corruption can be caused by a bad HDD.

Dee Cee

All the times but 1 I have gotten this error it was related to memory.
The other time was years ago with a AMD processor going out.

__________________
Deecee
Township Rebellion (retired)

MarzMartini

Like others have said, check your memory. The times I have gotten this error, were because of bad memory.

Unlike others experiences, I have had very good ones with Maxtor drives. Some running far, far beyond their MTBF. I have an old 430mb drive in an old linux box that has been running constantly since the day I got it. The drives that have caused problems for me have always been Western Digital or Fujutisu.

__________________

Cados Evilsbane

Ack, I sure hope it's not the memory. It'd suck to have to buy another gig of PC3200 . I'll take a looksy tho.

But would that error message I got point to the memory (3rd post down)?

__________________