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Posts Tagged ‘bsod’
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.
for all computer questions call overnight pc repair in woodland hills, ca at 877-938-8777 or visit online at www.overnightpcrepair.com
overheating cpu bsod
This gateway computer was brought to us because it was giving its owner a BSOD – Blue Screen of Death. at first our conversation sounded like this:
-Has blue screen been appearing often? answer was yes.
-What operating system are you running? Windows 7 upgraded from windows vista.
-Have you installed any new hardware or new software recently? No.
- Have you done this or have you done that? Answer was yes.
So next best thing I recommended to try and reinstall with a fresh copy of Windows 7 and not the upgrade. The person did so. and called me next day saying it was still giving him blue screen of death (bsod).
Needless to say – the computer repair expert was needed immediately!
As soon as computer was brought, we opened a case and saw that there was a lot of dust on the heat sink. talk about that much dust, where almost all the holes on top of it are covered. We didn’t even turn it on, but I can imagine the cpu fan had to spin pretty crazily. And it did (we later confirmed with the client). So we cleaned it out right away and started the pc.
Our first thought was that blue screen would appear because of over cpu overheating. However that simply defies all the rules and principles. because Blue screen of death (BSOD) only appears “because of incompatible drivers” “or incompatible hardware” – or so you would hear from any of the so-called-computer-experts anywhere.
Long story short. Next thing we did, since the fan was already cooling things down properly. We disconnected the cpu fan and well enough we got to witness blue screen of death for ourselves after we left computer on for about 20 minutes.
Further investigation was needed.
Upon reboot, we went into BIOS settings to check how the CPU temperature was rising and falling. After going through some settings for couple of minutes. my eye caught one interesting thing. there were two settings controlling cpu safety due to overheating:
1. shut down computer once processor (CPU) temperature reaches X.
2. Warn user once CPU temperature reaches Y.
and to my big surprise they were both OFF.
So here came the answer: CPU was overheating due to clogged up with dust cpu heatsink. Cpu would naturally overheat, sometimes in 20 minutes, sometimes in 30 minutes depending on usage and it wouldn’t know what to do afterwards. So system simply came up with blue screen of death.
I imagine hair raising up on someones back now, who is into CPU chips and micro technology. it is suffice to say that its not good at all for CPU to overheat like that to the MAX without being properly shut down at certain temperature.
But luckily it still works and functions without any trouble. Client is happy. Computer works great! Problem solved!
if you reside in chicago or los angeles and you have computer problems, overnight pc repair is a place to bring it to. our expertise is immediate and backed up by daily hands on experience of handling all kinds of computer repair issues. call us at 877-938-8777 now!
Eduardas Kubilinskas