Troubleshooting Windows BSODs (RAM?)

Associate
Joined
19 Mar 2009
Posts
163
Location
UK
Machine: Modern gaming-standard computer
OS: Windows 10

A couple of weeks ago we bought some new RAM to expand from 8gb to 16gb. Soon after, the computer started getting BSODs (unfortuantely at this stage I can't remember the errors). Firefox was crashing every few minutes (only thing I can remember).

We reformatted the computer and ran in to major issues:
* not being able to boot
* not being able to see the installation media
* not being able to install Windows to the chosen partition

We ran memtest on the new memory and discovered it had problems, so we've removed it and gone back to the 8gb we had before.

Eventually we managed to install Windows without an issue, and it's been running absolutely fine for a week with no problems.

Today we were playing Divinity: Original Sin and we had a BSOD with the following error:

8R0W9M7.jpg

After that, Divinity has started crashing regularly just saying it "needs to close". Firefox has also started crashing again. Within the next half hour we had both of these messages:

zPqAOu1.jpg

tyuEtEf.jpg

I realised that I'd installed some drivers manually for a wifi dongle yesterday evening, so I deleted them again which temporarily seemed to fix the issue. However, half an hour later after successfully playing for a while, we got this error:

zI5ygzd.jpg

We've just run memtest overnight with the old RAM which was working perfectly and found this:

QihlSzy.png

So our first step is to replace the RAM with some other sticks that I know work. However, where on earth do we start troubleshooting this after that? The new RAM definitely had issues, but before we installed that the computer was perfect for a year. What could possibly have gone wrong?
 
Last edited:
Soldato
Joined
5 Nov 2014
Posts
7,554
I don't know what could have gone wrong but what I would do is remove one stick of ram and run the tests again, if it passes with no errors you know then the one removed is faulty.

if you get errors put the stick you removed back in and then take out another, repeat this till you get no more errors and see if you still get issues
 
Associate
OP
Joined
19 Mar 2009
Posts
163
Location
UK
Hi everyone,

Thank you for your replies. We swapped out the RAM for some DIMMs that I knew were ok, and since then we haven't had a single crash, so I'm assuming it was faulty memory and marking this as solved.

Cheers!
 
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