Dear all, 

I'm the happy owner of a Dell E1705 laptop which worked like a charm for over 4 years 24x7 almost. I've seen many posts about this error and many people blaming Dell manufacturer others reporting this issue on IBM as well and other vendors and after did a lot of research after managed to trigger this error on my laptop, I thought is worth to spend the time and share my findings to all the community as some comments I've read here are totally unrelated to the issue itself - things like cooling - adding more fans etc.

The bottom line of the following error obtained is a hardware fault in one of your components - nothing more, nothing less - no drivers related, no over heat etc.
*** Hardware Malfunction
Call your hardware vendor for support
NMI: Parity Check/Memory Parity Error
*** The system has halted ***l

The above error I managed to get it after I replaced my 3495 Intel WLan chipset with a 5100 from a laptop which I knew the Lan port was broken - hence motherboard faulty. Everything would work just fine for about 5 - 10 minutes after which you would get the error - tried many things, multiple driver versions, nothing would help. Got another identical Wlan N 5100 Wlan card which I knew was working fine for a complete functional laptop and everything was stable and working like a charm. At this point, I discarded the hardware faulty 5100 Wireless card. For me was simpler as I knew that the only part I've changed in my configuration was the Wireless card and I knew that I had the laptop working fine for over 4 years with no issues at all. 

Conclusion: This error is the symptom of a faulty hardware (it could be a memory zone of one of the components - memory is part of Graphic Int. WLan card - pretty much all the components which have their own Cache memory, all besides the RAM of the system whom everybody thinks of first when they get the error). Please, try changing components starting with the ones you last changed in a chronological order, as mostly the one you are trying to use as an addition or to boost your system is going to prove to be faulty.

There's no laptop Vendor to blame, but a hardware component failure. (running vendor hardware diagnostics tools might help in localizing the faulty component that needs changed/replacing).

I hope this helped people who might run into this again.
Thank you for your time to read the post.
Regards, Pianist4Him.

Message Edited by airwolf_1984 on 09-08-200605:19 AM

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wily_nilly11 wrote:
As with everyone else reporting in this thread, I've also been getting the same NMI Parity Error.
Initially, the tech had me reseat my memory, run all the diagnostics (no errors found) and I even reinstalled Windows. None of the solutions solved the problem. And, since the problem only occurs every once in a while, everytime I tried something new, I had wait a while to see if the problem showed up again (which it always did). Eventually, Dell sent me new memory which again failed to solve the problem. Then, the tech asked me to try having only one of the memory sticks in at a time and see if that worked -- and it didn't. Next, the tech had me send my computer back to the repair center. Now, not to bash the repair center people too much, but the end result of sending it them was that they replaced my memory again (which obviously didn't fix the problem) and replaced my fans?!? The next attempt was sending someone to come and replace my motherboard last week... which I found out this last weekend has also failed to fix the problem (crashed again). In all, it's been over 2 months since I first contacted Dell about this problem and they still have yet to fix it. Granted that the nature of the problem makes it hard to know whether or not it has been fixed, but still, 2 months already. Now, I've got to contact Dell again and try another solution, but I thought I'd look through the forums again and see if others were having the same issue (which, based on this thread, there are). When I first encountered my problem, this thread didn't exist.

I've mostly had the Blue Screen show up on me when I'm not at the computer (like, I'm sleeping, wake up and find the system crashed, or away at work, come back and find the computer crashed. I've been leaving the computer on just in a blank screensaver). But, I've also had it crash on me when I was in the middle of surfing the web using firefox, playing a video game, and typing in microsoft word. So, I can't figure out a cause of the crash since I can't find a link between any of these.

For others who've had this same problem, when did you get your system from Dell? I wonder if there was a bad batch of some part that went through? My system was put together around the first week of August of this year (2006).

My system specs:
Inspiron E1705, Intel Core DuoProcessor T2600 (2.16GHz/667MHz FSB)
2GB, DDR2, 667MHz 2 Dimm
256MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS
100GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive
Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005

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