Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Blue Screen of Death ... ???

My decade old Dell XP devil box for the first ever shut down and flashed the blue screen of death a couple of months ago. The same thing happen yesterday.

Should I be concerned? Is my computer going to die? Is it on it's last leg?

I believe this is screen that came up ...



Both times this occurred was when I had multiple tabs open and consuming lots of memory while surfing the web.

Get an Apple.

Intrigued me since I don't remember a BSOD since Win98. Poked around and it's ambiguous, something trying to access an invalid IRQ level. Likely hardware or possibly a driver. I take it you haven't been installing hardware or tinkering with drivers lately.

Could be failing hardware, BUT... A "start here 'cuz it's cheap" popped up in a couple of places. It CAN be caused by something overheating and loosing its mind. Desktops are great at accumulating dust which can insulate parts to the point of overheating, particularly something that's been around as long as an XP box. Open her up and blow out any dust with canned or low pressure air, particularly the heat sink fins and fans. Pay attention to the power supply air flow so you get it all.

Bit of a long shot but it just might do the trick.

Usually when that happens they are dead, happened to ours twice and it was the hard drive both times. We have ours custom made and if you got a good computer guy they can recover all your stuff without loss.BUTT!! Don't dalley around get something going a s a p because the longer you go the more chance of loosing everything when it does finally die. Just my 2 cents worth from past history!!

I concur. I bought a new HP in 2011 with Windows 7. After 2 years of use it started to get blue screens about once per week. I got rid of it and bought a MacBook Air and I no longer get blue screens, popups, viruses, etc.

"Usually when that happens they are dead..."

Yeah but what died. With a PC you can replace a dead subsystem with an equal or better part from many sources relatively cheaply, the beauty of open architecture. (But then I've hated Apple since the Apple II.)

For hard drives, a full backup to an external drive and replace yourself. Your time != their money.

It's not dead. It is a system driver issue in software unless your processor itself is dying (highly unlikely)

gv3.sys is a driver for your processor. It was made obsolete with Windows XP service pack 2.

Here's Microsofts solution to your problem. Follow their instructions to the letter!

Fix?

Read that page very carefully and do what they say... good luck!

Thanks for info but it doesn't apply to my desktop.

The image of the BSofD was just something I copied and pasted and not the actual error message that was displayed. I should have written down the actual error message/codes but I didn't.

One thing I do know is I'm living on borrowed time. My computer should have died years ago.

Yes, if it happens again, you should write down the actual error codes.

Two common causes of the BSOD are our of date drivers, and heat.

If you have not blown out your heat sink lately with a can of compressed air, I would start there. This will alllow your processor to run cooler, and often fix the problem.

Next most common issue if video drivers. If you have not updated them in awhile, I would do so.

If neither of those work, it's time to start reading error codes.

But on a more practical level, If you box is 10 years old, you are probably ready for an upgrade. A new system with the same price point would have about 40x the power of your old system. You don't need all that power to just chat at the fire, but it can be useful in other applications.

Ah ok, I thought that was a screenshot of the actual problem.... lol

If you can get an actual screen shot with a camera or phone OR write that code stuff down it can be diagnosed.

Good advice from antelope sniper btw.

I would reseat all the cards and memory. Then clean out the dust and restart.

It's been five years since I cleaned the inside of it so it's due.

I'll that give a shot and see what happens. The next time I get the BSofD I'm buying a new box. It has a few glitches due to age, it limps along and works OK but it's time for an upgrade.

I've never dumped and re-installed the operating system. Kudos to Dell for building a very stout computer.

Got this old Gateway in 2003 and the only thing that died so far was the video card. Ebay to the rescue for an embarrassingly cheap used replacement, it's a good card. Actually the only thing that's holding me up is not enough memory. As memory got cheap software began to demand unholy gobs of it so lots of swapping over a slower bus to the hard drive. They happened to use Rambus in this particular model so it's expensive and I haven't gotten around to buying more. Still it's slow compared to new but I don't do anything that demanding and XP SP3 is fancy enough for me. Performance monitor shows a lot of CPU idle time while swapping off the hard drive. But then I started with a 2 MHz 8 bit processor and 16K of memory.

I'm "running" an Intel Pentium 4 1.8 ghz with 512 mb of RAM which I upgraded from 256.

It gets the job done but just barely.

Good chance the hard drive is dying, not always but more than likely.

My 2.5 year old Dell died last week (Mother board went). Had one of the local computer shops build me a new one with Windows 7.

So this box has a Pentium 4 at 2.66 GHz and 512 MB RAM. Used to be plenty when programs were in native code. But now it's faster/easier to write adding in script languages, frameworks and such at the expense of much bigger programs. Which became acceptable when RAM got cheap and popular. One of the latest compiler/IDEs I use requires 512 MB minimum. It's pretty but really doesn't do more than compiler/IDEs that need half that or less. You can see it in the latest version of Firefox, much slower to load/exit than a couple versions ago. System monitor shows it's using much more memory than before. So data gets swapped between RAM and disk a lot and over a bus that's much slower than the current standard.

The answer is more memory. This system came in two versions. One with SDRAM which is cheap and one with RDRAM which was slicker at the time but now obsolete and expensive. Guess which motherboard I have. And the motherboard maxes out at 2 GB.

With a memory upgrade your machine won't be anything like a new one but running undemanding tasks will be better. Of course you need to get rid of the BSOD problem before anything.

I was getting that screen almost weekly when I was living in Kazakhstan. Never caused a problem and I have not see it since leaving three months ago.

Dell Dimension 2400?

I have one of those and the HD is at capacity.

All 74GB of it.

Not true


A blue screen can be cause be a huge range of issues, from driver issues to hardware failures. Start by doing a google search on the code that the OS spits out during the blue screen. That should give you all the info you need.

Typically a driver or peripheral issue is the cause of such problems. However more in depth or complex issues can be the root cause.


If you can post the error code I can give you a specific cause and diagnosis. In addition I can help you troubleshoot the issue.


I have many years of professional experience working on and fixing computers. Feel free to shoot me a PM