New
#1
BSOD, always involves ntoskrnl.exe
I have an older (circa 2010-11) Gateway NV55C laptop that is becoming ever more unstable. It was the wifes, so when she gave up on it, it became my project computer. It was overheating and crashing if you tryed to do anything more intense than web browsing, and the fan sounded like it was going to blow. The CPU cores were always roasting hot on SpeedFan, so I figured when I opened it up to clean it out I'd drop in a new processor. I found a new i5-480M on eBay to replace the P-6100 it came with, which I figured was pretty safe as they share the same chipset and the 480m was the top of the line option for an NV55c at model release. Well, I cracked it open and lo and behold the fan was totally stuffed with cat fur and dust, probably was barely or not turning at all. I wiped everything down with alcohol wipes and hit what i couldn't reach with some compressed air, pulled the motherboard and swapped out for the new processor, put it all back together, crossed my fingers, and booted it up. It seemed like I was in the clear at first, booted right up, detected my new hardware, let me run an experience index, and the overheating problem is totally gone. Well it stayed stable for a couple of days, and I was really stoked, seemed like I'd breathed some life back into a machine that had been starting to show it's age in speed even without the overheating issues. Then it started freezing on me, not often, once per 4-6 hours of use, and seemingly at random. Then it started BSOD on about the same schedule. Well I'm reasonably savvy so after I made sure it wasn't out of date drivers or anything obvious like my security software, I went ahead and did a clean system install updated windows and my basic drivers and if anything it was worse than before, so I did it again, figured this time I'd do the drivers before the updates and test performance with the original driver sets from OEM (Gateway). Well unfortunately now I'm stuck, I can boot up just fine, but almost anything initiates varying blue screens "IRQL not less or equal" and "Page fault in a non paged area", being most common. I can't even launch the Windows Update control panel without BSOD. OK, longwinded, but there it is, any help would be greatly appreciated!