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Inspiron 570 Intermittently Crashes
I've been trying to save a budget desktop we picked up from the outlet last year. It was great while under the 90-day warranty, but over the last three months it has started randomly rebooting. There has been no rhyme or reason to the crashes. One day it will reboot 3-4 times in an hour while using just Internet Explorer and Outlook, and another day it will be perfectly stable while running Word, Excel, a database program, IE, Outlook, iTunes, and AIDA's system stress tests.
It is stock with a DualCore AMD Athlon II X2 245, 2900 MHz (14.5 x 200) , 4 GB of DDR3-1333 DDR3 SDRAM, ATI Radeon 4200 graphics, 500 GB Western Digital WD5000AAKX-753CA1 hard drive and came with Win7 Home Premium 64 upgraded to Pro. I also plopped in a Seagate 160 GB drive as a slave so I could pull off data from the old Dell that this replaced.
Besides going through event logs and crash dump history (I couldn't find a common theme), my troubleshooting has included pulling the Seagate out, disbling the CPU throttling in BIOS, replacing the failing power supply (yup, after not even a year) with a fresh 430-watt unit, getting a new surge strip, moving the mouse and keyboard to different USB ports, updating then deleting video and audio drivers, and even switching the DIMMs around. The erratic rebooting continues.
I also discovered that disabling Win7's reboot on blue screen setting doesn't result in a blue screen - it still reboots. I would be comforted just a little if it would hang at a blue screen.
This weekend, I tried running Easy Transfer so I could migrate it over to a new Optiplex, but it kept crashing. I copied the drive with Disk2VHD and was able to run the 570 from VirtualBox on my XPS laptop without any glitches. This makes me think the 570 has a physical defect and the problems have nothing to do with the software environment. I'm inclined to plop in a Phenom II X4 965 on the gamble that the Athlon has a bum core. I've already tested the memory with AIDA and MemTest and tested the video with AIDA and run the full Dell diagnostics without any errors or mysterious crashes.
Would it make sense to keep chasing after a solution, or should I just give up on this piano black lemon? I've never had so much trouble with a PC. Well, there was that Packard-Bell 386...
DELL-Chris M
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January 4th, 2013 08:00
TrevDog,
Try running the free version of WhoCrashed. WhoCrashed will analyze the crash dump files available on your computer and create a conclusion. It will inform you about responsible drivers and offer suggestions on how to proceed.
http://www.resplendence.com/download/whocrashedSetup.exe
TrevDog
7 Posts
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February 28th, 2013 16:00
Hi Chris:
I finally got back to this system. WhoCrash is a lot easier to use than NirSoft's bluescreen viewer, but now I'm stuck with Bug Check 0x124: WHEA_UNCORRECTABLE_ERROR. I can't figure out what has failed or is failing.
On Thu 2/28/2013 10:26:40 PM GMT your computer crashed
crash dump file: C:\Windows\Minidump\022813-48282-01.dmp
This was probably caused by the following module: ntoskrnl.exe (nt+0x4AF70C)
Bugcheck code: 0x124 (0x0, 0xFFFFFA8004B435F8, 0x0, 0x0)
Error: WHEA_UNCORRECTABLE_ERROR
file path: C:\Windows\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
product: Microsoft® Windows® Operating System
company: Microsoft Corporation
description: NT Kernel & System
Bug check description: This bug check indicates that a fatal hardware error has occurred. This bug check uses the error data that is provided by the Windows Hardware Error Architecture (WHEA).
This is likely to be caused by a hardware problem problem. This problem might be caused by a thermal issue.
The crash took place in the Windows kernel. Possibly this problem is caused by another driver that cannot be identified at this time.
On Thu 2/28/2013 9:11:09 PM GMT your computer crashed
crash dump file: C:\Windows\Minidump\022813-35256-01.dmp
This was probably caused by the following module: ntoskrnl.exe (nt+0x4AF70C)
Bugcheck code: 0x124 (0x0, 0xFFFFFA8004AF38F8, 0x0, 0x0)
Error: WHEA_UNCORRECTABLE_ERROR
file path: C:\Windows\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
product: Microsoft® Windows® Operating System
company: Microsoft Corporation
description: NT Kernel & System
Bug check description: This bug check indicates that a fatal hardware error has occurred. This bug check uses the error data that is provided by the Windows Hardware Error Architecture (WHEA).
This is likely to be caused by a hardware problem problem. This problem might be caused by a thermal issue.
The crash took place in the Windows kernel. Possibly this problem is caused by another driver that cannot be identified at this time.
These two crashes occurred about an hour after reinstalling Win7 64 Home Premium, which is how the system was shipped. The 0x124 is the same fault I saw under Pro. Since attempts to resolve it (removing programs & drivers, reinstalling the CPU and memory, making sure the system was clean and all the fans worked) didn't improve it, I figured a fresh installation might be the way to go, but it didn't improve at all.