17

I’m using Windows 7 (64-bit) 16GB RAM (2x8GB RAM sticks).

Yesterday I got a blue screen while using my computer (Chrome browsing mostly).

enter image description here

For checking that it is not a memory problem - I ran “Windows memory diagnostic tool” (which comes with Windows).

Question

Regarding RAM sticks only:

Windows memory diagnostic tool showed no errors. Can I conclude that the RAM sticks are fine? Or are there any other errors that are not recognized by this tool?

|improve this question
  • what where you developing in Visual studio? If you are developing something e.g. in c++ that has to do with interrupts, the reason might rather be somethign like that. – TechImpossible Oct 27 '15 at 20:41
  • @TechImpossible Valid point. I'm just using web stuff. no unsafe operations. – Royi Namir Oct 27 '15 at 20:42
  • 8
    Your BSOD indicates a kernel-level segfault/null-pointer access. Specifically, an instruction at address 0xFFFFF800030E518F attempted to write to memory address 0x0000000000000080 while at IRQL 2. This could occur because of a bit-flip in memory, but smells to me more like a driver bug. The one time this occurred to me involved a bad Wifi driver, which I downgraded. Whoever supplied the instruction at the 0xFFFFF8... address is the guilty party and should be disabled. – Iwillnotexist Idonotexist Oct 27 '15 at 22:18
  • 1
    Agreed with @IwillnotexistIdonotexist - this definitely seems like a driver bug. Try running WhoCrashed to get more info from your dump file. I've seen this on newer mobos with various older PCI hardware. Also bad USB drivers for older devices that don't like running on XHCI, etc. – J... Oct 28 '15 at 12:16
  • 1
    I agree with @IwillnotexistIdonotexist - it smells of driver bug - see one of the answers below that talks about using WinDbg to diagnose. If you suspect RAM, I will say that I've had very bad RAM that RAM tests couldn't diagnose. If you start getting lots of crashes, a good test is whether or not your computer crashes after that stick is removed from the computer (aka, swap out your sticks one at a time). It can take quite a lot of waiting, but it works. – Nick Oct 29 '15 at 19:16
37

No, the fact that the Windows memory diagostic tool passes does not mean your RAM is definitely fine. A much more thorough tool is memtest86. This tool often finds memory problems that do not show up in other tests. You'll want to run an extended test at least overnight.

|improve this answer
  • 14
    Upon buying RAM, first thing I do is memtest it for at least 24 hours if not 48. – Naftuli Kay Oct 27 '15 at 23:25
  • 6
    @NaftuliTzviKay Are you sure that's necessary? I've never run memtests on my RAM, and only do so in response to issues that appear, of which I've only had one in eight years. – Aza Oct 28 '15 at 3:26
  • 5
    BE CAREFUL: There are some versions that give false negatives (false errors) on the 7th test (something related to random numbers). Use the latest version. The issue is fixed on those. Buggy versions are included on Ubuntu ISOs. I'm not sure if they updated their version or not. – Ismael Miguel Oct 28 '15 at 9:08
  • 2
    @Soapy the problem is, with faulty RAM you don't get a BSOD immediately after putting it in! You might get BSOD seemingly random, or maybe the results of some calculations are just wrong. Or files you save are faulty. If it was "put in faulty RAM, get BSOD" there wouldn't be any test tools to begin with.But with todays prices I use ECC memory whenever possible, especially because I like the ZFS filesystem and wouldn't dare to use it without ECC RAM. – Josef Oct 28 '15 at 12:21
  • 2
    @user13743 Memtest86+ tells you which slot failed... so you can test them all at once. – SnakeDoc Oct 28 '15 at 18:36
9

Windows memory diagnostic tool showed no errors. Can I conclude that the RAM sticks are fine? Or are there any other errors that are not recognized by this tool?

No you can't, I don't know of any software tests for RAM that are 100% infallible.

If the BSOD is a one off I'd put it down to a power issue, if it occurs more often I'd start looking at hardware and drivers.

Your error message could be related to drivers, check if you have updated any of your drivers recently. With errors like this the Microsoft site has a lot of troubleshooting information on specific errors. I won't go into them because your question is just about RAM, but I suggest you check out MS.

|improve this answer
9

This error indicates that some driver at the kernel level attempted to write to paged virtual memory (that means slow virtual memory that is baked by a hard disk's paged file) during interrupt request that was meant to be processed really fast. This is most likely a software fault.

Windows has several interrupt request levels (more info here and here). Some IRQLa are designed to handle system critical stuff like power mode changes, CPU clock ticks etc. The higher the level - the less stuff a driver can do. For example during a power failure a driver cannot access any memory - it's too slow for that.

If you want to troubleshoot this and pin-point a faulty driver you'll need to open memory dump that was collected right after the crash. You can double check the location of the dump in System Properties > Advanced > Startup and Recovery > Settings > Dump file. See the picture

enter image description here

You can then open dump file with tools, such as WinDbg (download the right version for your Windows) and in WinDbg you can run analyze -v on the dump. This should tell you which driver is likely to be at fault.

|improve this answer

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.