XP problem

[Dr Unne]

Windows XP was randomly crashing on me. At first I didn't know why because of XP's ingenious "auto-reboot instantaneously after a blue screen of death" feature. So I turned that off and waited a few hours of the customary crash, and I wasn't disappointed. Well, I wasn't disappointed about it not crashing. The error message is as follows.

DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

If anyone could translate that from Microsoft gibberish to English, I'd appreciate it. If you want, I'll go have it crash again so I can also include the ever-so-useful hexidecimal dump of my register contents that it displays. Here's an approximation. 0x0000000000000001 0x0000000000000003 0x0000000000000000 0x0000000000000000

I need XP to play PristonTale. For now. But it doesn't even crash while playing that game. It crashes when I use AIM, or when I'm doing nothing at all. I assume it's a problem with some device driver. Or some piece of hardware. That narrows it down to everything in my computer. Google was very unhelpful in explaining this.

[Erdrick Holmes]

What the gay? Are you using Pro or Home? I use pro and it has never crashed on me once, I never used Home so if it has to do with Pro then your system is prolly messed up somewheres.

[Dr Unne]

I use Pro. My XP install is less than two months old, on a brand new computer I just bought from Dell. I don't get hourly crashes when using Gentoo, so I believe my hardware is fine, but I don't really know.

[Shiroi Kumo]

Originally posted by Dr Unne
I use Pro. My XP install is less than two months old, on a brand new computer I just bought from Dell. I don't get hourly crashes when using Gentoo, so I believe my hardware is fine, but I don't really know. Found your problem.

Cheers.

[crono_logical]

DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL is a dodgy driver error, from what I remember (most likely video card driver, especially if you've got an nVidia card), and yes, I've only seen it happen consistently on Dell laptops, though I don't put it past a Dell PC either :p

You really need to note the actual STOP code as well though, that number is more useful, then you can look it up on the MS site to see what exactly is wrong. You also might want to look at the Dell site for specific drivers rather than downloading generic nvidia drivers from nvidia, for example.

[Citizen Bleys]

*snarky sniping*

I think you'll find a patch at www.redhat.com

[Dr Unne]

I'll look for a STOP code then, thanks. I do have an nVidia card. I was thinking maybe it was my soundcard, but I'll check both next time I reboot.

I don't blame Dell. Gentoo works perfectly fine. Redhat probably would work fine too. Work, as in suck.