BSOD Hell. Bios? Mem?

So last night, i left my notebook on to continue some downloads. when i woke up the computer was on but no monitor. i tried restoring from standby but that wasn't the case. i did a hard boot. upon the windows loading screen, got a BSOD. Ok. I restarted and got back into Windows the next try.

Later in the day i tried to resume from standby and i got a BSOD. Restarted and back into Windows, i get that old virus thing about the services.exe not responding, windows will shutdown in 59 seconds, blah blah. Great.
I turn it off, reboot and get BSODs on the windows loading screen.
I try booting into safe mode but was unsuccessful the first couple tries. Once in safemode, it was not stable and got another error/bsod.

So, since I had my old 5400rpm drive still around and untouched, i switched it out and tried to boot up (thinking that something was wrong with the registry or some other problem with the new drive which had been working just fine for at least a week).
With the old drive in, I get similar errors. No success. So, I put the Toshiba recovery disk in to reformat and restore to out-of-box state. During which, i get a Recovery Error 10E71606F8. Had to turn off the machine. I checked Google on another computer for this code and no results.

I tried booting back into the recovery disk and started the recover process again, which got to about 5% again and this time got a different error...
This time it was an IRQL_"not equal to or less than" (or something to that effect) error.

And here I am.

I hope I've included enough information to get some initial replies for suggestions.
Since this is obviously not a Hard Drive issue, is it a BIOS problem? a Memory problem? (the memory is new also, but again no problems for the whole week that the new components were running smoothly).

Should I try putting the old mem back in and then start the recovery disk process over?

Thank you in advance to everyone who reads this whole thing and tries to help!

 

Mr. Eshelman's tips might help. http://aumha.org/win5/kbestop.php#0x0a

Luck.

 

Getting a lot of random errors usually points to faulty memory. Try putting your old memory back in.

- Trip

 

Alcyon,

Any chance an auto update went off and confluxeded things?

 

you mean a Windows auto update? I do not know. I'll check the Windows update site for my history of downloads, but I know I received updates the day or two prior to all this mishap.

*EDIT* According to my update history, there was an Update on Thursday. But I remember manually installing this one using the custom option and it was around midday. The problems started early early Friday morning.*EDIT*

I went to Microcenter and bought an external enclosure for the drive to save all my data. After doing so, I took out one of the 1GB sticks of new memory and tried the restore disc again. Half way through, got another error. I took the other stick out and put the other one back in. I figured it was most likely one or the other but not both. This time everything seems peachy.

I put my old HDD back in and it's like I was never down. Going to send this one memory stick back to NewEgg and hopefully they'll send me a replacement real soon.

So did the memory stick just die all of a sudden? They were working really well this whole week, working with CAD and Photoshop (and large files 150MB psd files and 25MB jpgs) with no problems. What a short life to live. Sad.


Thank you both for your help!

 

It could have just been faulty. Nothing's 100% perfect. I work at a repair shop and I've seen it happen before. (You should have seen the last shipment of power supplies we got; all 18 of them were bad)

- Trip

 

I was just throwing out some ideas.

ISTR that the statisic on memory and hdd failure is called a bathtub or inverted bathtub curve. Flat in the middle, peaks at both ends. (smile)

You might want to consider burning-in your upgraded unit. There's some s/w available through the Review a Notebook links here on NBR.

--tripinva, The p/s thing is horrid!

Folks should also consider (recently published stuff) that as hdds get larger and larger the mean failure rate is going up up up.