BSOD...NMI: Parity Check/Memory Parity Error

Sorry if this is the wrong forum.

OK, so in the past two days, I have gotten a BSOD thrice. All of them with the same message stating that there's a hardware malfuntion, that I need to call the hardware vendor, and that the system has halted. Every single time, it occured while playing TF2. Now, I figure the first thing to do is run memtest86+ and see if something's wrong with the RAM. However, looking at a very long post on the Dell forums, seems it could also be the graphics card? Or, could it be Windows causing the problem? As of late, Windows XP has been very unstable for me. Sometimes it never reaches the login screen, sometimes it gets past that but never loads the taskbar or anything else, and it's quite a bit slower. Windows 7 and Linux haven't shown any problems thus far.

Thanks.

 

Did you recently update any drivers?

 

Now that you mention it, I did install automatic updates a couple days back.

 

I had a rash of parity errors when using a particular driver with my old wifi card. Once I found a modded driver, the crashes stopped. You might want to review the updates that were installed and see if a driver was "updated".

 

That's a good idea. Will try that now. Any other thoughts/suggestions?

 

I'm 95% positive that there's a driver causing your problem (since you alluded to running other operating systems on the same computer without incident), especially since you've noticed irregularities with XP recently. It might be related to a recent update, or a driver may have been corrupted by something else around the same time as the latest updates were installed.

You could try using a registry cleaner to scan for potential problems, or you might opt to try a repair action with your XP disc. At any rate, it's probably a good time to back things up in case of a catastrophic failure.

 

Just to make clear, do you ever run TF2 in Windows 7 ?

(And you never have the problem in Windows 7, right ?)

 

Sounds good. Will go ahead and get to work on that. And I should be backing everything up tomorrow. And thanks for all the tips.

Actually, once I finish the virus scan, I was going to test just that. I'll come back with results.

 

Just an update. I wasn't able to test TF2 on Windows 7, yet, since I have to download it and Steam servers have been supposedly busy. Also, I went back to the most recent updates that were installed, removed them, and ran TF2 again. So far, no BSOD. I'll continue testing it to see how things turn out. Thanks again.