In one week, four different BSODs?!

Hi all,
I have been trying to resolve my problem in the past week and a half.
Any thoughts and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

I did a factory restore on my XPS m1530 laptop a while ago. Afterward it starts giving my blue screen of death. The most common occurring BSOD is memory management upon start up. Then the last time it gave me a pfnlist BSOD. I had done several factory restore to no avail. Just yesterday I decided to give Windows 7 a try so I wiped out whole drive partition including the factory image drive D to make one single drive partition. It was working fine in the beginning. Then I received Bad Pool Header BSOD upon start up so I rebooted the machine and now it shows memory management BSOD again when booted.

I am guessing the RAM is bad?

 

Best is to ask for a replacement

 

Unfortunately my warranty was expired around the beginning of September. I went to the Dell website and saw that even a phone call cost $50 per incident for tech support.

That's why I throw this out if anybody knows what might be the solution.
Laptop broke a month after my warranty expires....

 

It's still worth a phone call. Dell allowed me to return my laptop two days after the 21 day period.

Any programs you've installed since the factory restore? Have you tried running a Memory diagnostic program?

 

I have been running memtest86. So far it has no error detected. It had 10 passes with 0 error.

 

Drivers? You installed them for chipset, GPU, etc.?

Any question marks in Device Manager?

 

Yeah, I did.
Under Vista, because it's factory image so it already has all the drivers installed.
For Windows 7, I had installed all the drivers from Dell while some is automatically installed by Windows 7.

 

Factory image or from the restore disk? I was under the impression that the restore disk only had Windows/no drivers: mine was like that.

Could be heat...run ORTHOS or Prime95; how are the temperatures?

~Ibrahim~

 

I'd stick with the drivers recommended by Dell for now. This way you can narrow down the cause of the issue. Which build of Windows 7 did you install? RC or MSDN RTM?

 

I did factory image which is saved in my harddrive. Dell didn't supply restore CD. It only supplied Vista CD and drivers CD.

As for the drivers, I had problem with BSOD beginning with Vista almost everytime I boot up the laptop after factory image restore even with many tries. After I switched to Windows 7, it's less, but still exist nonetheless.

 

I'm pulling at strings, but how are the CPU temperatures? Ever dusted it?

~Ibrahim~

 

Did you reseat the RAM? In my case, I got a brand new 1340 and one stick of 4GB RAM appears to be bad. I ran memtest 4.0 and both sticks were "fine," but a collection of BSODs all complaining about IRQL_NOT... seem to indicate otherwise. I reseated them, swapped them (acted a bit differently then, with service crashes instead) and ran each one by itself. I got it down to one stick that would BSOD all by itself, but it took a while. I had to wait for Dell to "officially" support Windows 7, so I'm going to try on Monday (if they're open) and see if they support it yet.

 

My M1530 has been having blue screens about twice a day for the last month. I finally called Dell support, and since the computer had been torn apart and re-assembled about 8 times (4 motherboards later!), they decided to replace it.

If you're out of warranty, you're probably SOL, as it took quite a bit of persistence, even with a warranty, to get them to do anything about it.

You can check reseating the RAM and anything else that may be loose, but the BSODs may just be a symptom of Dell's component quality.

 

Multiple different BSODs are typically a sign that the motherboard is dying.

 

Problem solved!
Thank you all for your help.

I finally decided to give Dell a call. The lady who helped me was very nice. We ran diagnosis and found no problem with hardware and decided that it was software problem so we did a reinstallation of OS. A day later, the problem still persisted.

Then I decided to run the Dell hardware diagnosis again and this time it gives error message while testing the memory. Thus, the problem was a faulty memory stick. I replaced the old RAM with a new set of RAM and everything works great now.

Thank you all for your suggestions!
For those who may experience the same problem as I did, hope this helped.

 

I love the feeling of having a fixed computer...it's like crack, the high you get. It's kind of messed up.

lol, whatever: I'm glad it's fixed!

~Ibrahim~

 

I'm glad you gave them a call. Nothing like exhausting all the options.