NMI: Parity Check / Memory Parity Error

pray to god you never get this message, because if you do you might spend a great deal of time learning things you don’t want to learn 🙂 guessing things you thought you’d never guess and possibly come out without any results at the end.

to keep long story short. I spent about 3 days on and off playing with this computer. It was a sony vaio s460 – the one I fixed last week. we brought it back to the customer and she called saying it was getting blue screen of death all over again!

This parity check error is very confusing. if you go searching google or even microsoft site you will find direct suggestions that its your memory problem.

And even though that’s where I started, it was not the case for me.  I ran some RAM tests with couple of software programs, Ubuntu live cd 9.0 has one which is free to use and takes a while it. I did it and the test was complete without errors. the system had two RAM chips. so I took one out and tried with running pc with the remaining one. and I still got the same blue screen. I then switched to the second chip only and still I would get the blue screen.

this was frustrating. it seemed it would require a lot of testing.

second day I thought perhaps its windows xp problem, so I installed windows 7 on it just to give it a shot. At first it seemed like a good idea, because windows 7 gave me the windows recovery error on boot up and it said it was sound card related. However after I updated the driver it still gave me memory parity error.

On other websites I also found this error can be due to bad power supply or any of the hardware components may be failing.

for this computer it was an external wireless PC card Netgear wg511t – I can actually put it in now and get parity error message in about 5 minutes 🙂 so do your testing before you jump to any conclusions. blue screens of death are weird. you almost never know what is happening. It requires trying and figuring it out, unless of course you have advanced diagnostic tools.

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