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#1
BSOD 1-3 Times a Day, Usually While Not In Use
Hello,
I could use some help figuring out why my system is throwing almost daily BSODs. First, a bit of background (maybe excessive, but could be helpful). I have a Dell XPS 720. My boyfriend bought it in March 2008 and ran it with Windows XP and loved it. Earlier this year, he upgraded it to Windows 7 Ultimate so he could expand the RAM and began experiencing numerous BSODs and distortion of his photos while editing that was only visible on his system. He had a lot on his plate at the time, tons of photos to edit, and got really frustrated with it. After messing with it for weeks, he finally threw up his hands and bought a newer system with 7 already loaded on it. When he finally got over his desire to burn the XPS, he gave it to me to try to tinker with, since I didn't have any time crunches and I'd been wanting another desktop since my own died 4 years ago.
So I popped in new drives, did a fresh install of Windows 7 Ultimate, and had no issues, at first. Everything ran smoothly and awesomely. Installed some photo editing software, no issues. So started doing Windows Updates, and after a day or two of churning through those, I started getting BSODs. So I checked a few things, looked on Dell's site for driver updates (but they never did any for XPS for Win 7), etc. Wiped the drive, reinstalled, and again started doing the updates, this time in small batches of 20. Eventually started getting more BSODs and figured out the culprit - Windows Update was pushing out a crappy driver for the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT card in the system! I did one more wipe, hide that update, then installed the recently released Win 7 driver from Nvidia. Did the remaining updates with no more issues except SP1 would never install. Also had no more BSODs.
Through all that, my system was getting online by jacking to my laptop and using its wifi. After a week of stability, I went to BestBuy to get a wireless card for the XPS. They didn't have any PCI cards (above their price point locally....whatever), so I took the Netgear WNA 3100 USB wifi the clerk recommended. After installing it on 9/21, I kept having issues with its software crashing (and taking the wifi with it), which then for some reason killed my task bar and weird issues. I disabled the software (uninstalling rendered the wifi useless), which solved that issue, though it still randomly doesn't work after a restart until I unplug and replug the wifi.
On 9/27, I began getting BSODs again, and after days of doing various searches, fix attempts, etc, I'm at a loss. I've already gone through and updated the sound card drivers with the latest from Soundblaster, the video card with the newest release from Nvidia (from yesterday), and the USB thing with the newest from Netgear. I'm current on all the Windows update except the aforementioned SP1 which continued to fail all install attempts so I pretty much gave up on it. I looked through the errors with BlueScreenView, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to really understand what I'm seeing. I did try searching the different driver names shown with BSOD, but I didn't find any consistent answers. I've run memtest multiple times, no issues there. I've run a disk check and also no issues found on any of the three disks.
Here are the system specs:
- Windows 7 Ultimate x64
- Intel Core2 2.40 GhZ Quad CPU Q6600
- 4 GB Ram
- Soundcard: Soundblaster X-Fi Gamer
- Video Card: Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT
- Monitor: Samsung SyncMaster 933
- The three hard drives are all 750 GB Seagate drives
And attached are the files per the instructions. So any ideas? The BSODs annoy me slightly, but most actually happen while I'm asleep or at work, so they aren't hideously disruptive. My sweetie feels bad, though, so I'd love to be able to solve these issues for good.