Trying to figure out BSOD cause

[BSOD Hater]

I've been trying to figure out for the better part of a year what's causing the occasional BSOD. Found this place just now and I'm hoping to finally get it sorted out.

I checked with Who Crashed just before finding Seven Forums and it sounds like one cause is the ATI driver. The other stuff it said I didn't really understand. At least it doesn't sound likely to be faulty ram. I was becoming very worried it was a hardware problem but after seeing what Who Crashed said that actually sounds unlikely, which is a relief.

One reason I was very worried it might be a hardware problem is I found out at some point that a rodent had chewed the cord for the surge protector the pc was plugged into. This was a heavy duty surge protector too, with switches to turn off individual plugs on the protector. Hard to find a similar replacement

I don't know how long it was like that before I noticed, or if there was enough damage to affect the power going to the pc. But the wires inside the cord were showing. And AFAIK insufficient power supply can wreak havoc on a pc. I don't know if that info is useful for diagnosing BSOD or not.

Something else I don't know if it would help. It seems like BSOD is more likely if hibernation has been used. I've never had stability problems with hibernation on any other pc or laptop and I use hybernation a lot. It has also BSODed when hibernation wasn't used, so that's confusing.

Anyway I've downloaded the newest ATI driver through their autodetect tool, but I don't know if I have to uninstall the old driver first for the sake of trying to remove any BSOD issue that might be related to it. Usually I just install the latest video card driver without uninstalling the old one. Is that bad to do?

 

[Pauly]

The newest dump files in your upload are 6 months old and not really relevant anymore, have you had crashes in the last 6 months ??

 

[BSOD Hater]

Ah, I didn't think about that. I have not been using it for the last six months. After the last bluescreen I ran a chkdisk just to make sure the hard drive wasn't having problems. It froze during the chkdisk so that scared me that there was a chance the hard drive might be failing.

I decided then not to turn on the pc again (except to back up some files) until I could figure out what was causing the periodic bluescreens (and especially rule out failing hardware, which I was very suspicious of).

So I've been using a laptop exclusively since then and the pc has only been turned on a few times, to back up some files. Actually, the next time I turned on the pc the chkdisk resumed where it had left off. It didn't seem like there was a problem with the hard drive but I didn't have any idea what was going wrong or what I should do.

After failing to find helpful BSOD information several times I finally found Who Crashed, and a google of the Who Crashed results brought me to this place.

 

[Pauly]

OK I see, in that case lets work with what we have but as we go through this if you experience more BSODs please run the tool again and upload files each time.

Previous dump files give varied bugcheck codes blaming various causes (mostly windows components/drivers) so not much we can usefully use there.
Given the bugcheck codes are mostly 0xA/0x50 I would say RAM is a probable cause as is windows corruption

Firstly use your laptop to download and create a bootable flash drive of memtest86+ as per the link below and allow this to run for several hours/overnight for a minimum of 8 complete consecutive passes
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/105647-ram-test-memtest86.html

If the ram test comes back ok then try running an sfc scan to verify the integrity of windows system files, if problems are found please post your sfc log file for someone to check
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/1538-sfc-scannow-command-system-file-checker.html

 

[BSOD Hater]

Turned the pc on for the first time in a few months in order to grab some files and got a bluescreen within a few minutes, so I'm uploading the scan result.

I haven't run memtest yet because apparently memtest86+ cannot see my either of my usb drives. I tried in both the Win 10 laptop and the Win 7 pc shortly after your last reply. With either usb flash drive plugged in, nothing is selectable to use in memtest86+. Windows see the drives just fine on either computer (and can write to/read from them) but it's like memtest doesn't believe there's a usb flash drive plugged in. A google search showed me that other people have had this problem too with various usb flash drives for whatever reason.

I hadn't mentioned this because I had been planning to get a 32gb usb drive to use as a Windows recovery drive sometime soon. I figured I could just temporarily use that as a memtest drive before making it a recovery drive instead, whenever I get it. So strange that memtest can't find either my 256mb or 1gb usb drive though. I figured the 256mb one would be perfect to use for that as it's so small it's practically useless for anything else. There's nothing wrong with the usb drives either, as I mentioned above. I guess memtest86+ must just be kind of fiddly.

 

[Golden]

MemTest86+ tests RAM - it has nothing to do with USB or other drives.

The latest bugcheck is still 0x50, so Pauly's advice still holds : run Memtest86+ as instructed.