Help

If your having Blue Screen of Death and it is due to memory problems. You may have a defective/failing pair of ram.

Usually memory problem BSOD is if the ram is failing. The ram overclocking is unstable or if your a hardcore 7GHZ CPU frequency overclocker setting the voltage on the ram pass 1.65v damaging the entire cpu memory controller.

Best way to test whether you have a software or hardware problem is use MemTest86 which you need a CD/DVD or flashdrive and boot into or a fast method which is use Prime95 Stresstest
which will run the CPU at full load 100% and also test the ram. If the pc blue screens then your have mostly like a hardware problem. If the pc doesn't BSOD follow the steps above suggested by others by reseating the ram, cpu or do combofix in safemode.

http://www.memtest.org/

http://download.cnet.com/Prime95/3000-2053_4-192895.html

i downloaded prime95, i ran it and it didn't do anything. the next time I blue screen i'll see if i can catch the error message, and i'll post it here. other than the few times it blue screens, my pc is fine. (might i also add that i have a limited computer knowledge and it's not a custom built rig) . thanks for the help though

so it happened again. I was chatting a friend on facebook and listening to music, and the audio distorted and i got a BSOD. it happens pretty quick so i wrote down the most important sounding piece of info:
STOP 0x0000007f does that help?

This error message can occur if either of the following conditions exists:

• Your computer has hardware or software problems (hardware failure is the most common cause).
  
• You try to over clock the speed of your computer's processor (for example, you set a 150 MhZ processor to run at 187 MhZ).
  

The above STOP error means a trap occurred in kernel mode and the trap is either one the kernel is not allowed to have or is always fatal. The most common causes of a STOP 0x7F are:

• Low-level hardware corruption, such as corrupt memory (RAM)
  
• Mismatched memory modules
  
• A malfunctioning motherboard
  

Pulled from Microsoft website.

um ok, that doesn't sound good. fortunately this computer is pretty old, and my family is definitely going to upgrade soon. does anyone know of a place that i can back up things like pictures and music?

For your data trouble ..

(assuming your hard drive wasn't ruined)

External Enclosure Method

Costs: You'll need to purchase an external enclosure if you don't already have one. You should be able to find a decent one for under $50.

Difficulty: This is probably the easiest method.

In this method, the intention is to simply remove the "bad" drive from the dead system, place it into an external enclosure (following the instructions from the manufacturer), and then plug it into the USB port of a working computer (for best results the working computer should be running the same version of Windows, or better, than the dead system was running. This is because old operating systems cannot read new file systems.

Once you plug the external enclosure into a working system, open windows explorer, find the hard drive that holds your files, and copy them to the working system's hard drive, space permitting, or burn CDs/DVDs as needed.

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