My PC has AIDS, Please Fix

DtotheG

I'm dead serious, it sucks out loud. I get blue screen'd even when I do NOTHING, and the most recent games I could run are Unreal Tournament (1) and Neverwinter Nights (1). So, two-part question:

I run an Intel Celeron 2.40 GHz with 512 MB of RAM and a Raedon 9200 (PCI, 128MB). I have a 40GB hard drive and a CD-ROM (as opposed to DVD)

What do these BSOD errors mean and how can I fix them?
0x0000000A
0x0000008E
0x0000001A
0x00000050
0x000000D1
0x000000C2
0x0000004E

I plan on making some upgrades to my PC:
1. Getting a 256 MB video card
2. Getting 1 GB of RAM
3. Bigger Hard Drive
4. DVD-ROM (seriously, I saw a collection of HL games (HL:S, HL2:Ep 1, CS:S, and HL2) for $20 and couldn't play them because I don't have a DVD ROM.
So the second question is, do I need to make these upgrades if it will make my PC more stable, or should I fix the BSOD errors first and see how it goes?

Antishow

Those numbers are just the memory addresses that weren't behaving when Windows crapped out on you. I don't think they really mean anything to anyone, except maybe the troglodytes that develop Windows from deep within Microsoft's icy depths.

I would totally get those upgrades though. I'd probably get the video card last, as it's the least conspicuous upgrade (outside of texture resolution in games).

Veevee

Antishow wrote: »

I would totally get those upgrades though. I'd probably get the video card last, as it's the least conspicuous upgrade (outside of texture resolution in games).

That and you'd probably want to upgrade the CPU and motherboard before the video card anyways. Especially if you only have PCI slots and no AGP or PCI-E.

Savant

Yeah, it's hard to say what that means given just the memory addresses. However, they are all fairly low numbers (only 2 digits), which is off limits for user applications in windows. BSOD means there is probably a hardware problem or a problem with the drivers or the windows setup. Check and make sure you don't have any viruses though. I'd check some other things before just throwing more components at the system.

Here is a page on BSODs http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1647&page=8

DtotheG

Thanks for the help so far guys. I found out that the 8E problem was with win32k.sys

Also, are these errors caused by just DLing games and Opera and stuff?

Savant

DtotheG wrote: »

Thanks for the help so far guys. I found out that the 8E problem was with win32k.sys

Also, are these errors caused by just DLing games and Opera and stuff?

I wouldn't think so, unless maybe those games have malware in them. I think a low level software (like drivers or operating system) or hardware problem is more likely. The system could be running out of memory, but the errors for that looked like they were slightly different.

TychoCelchuuu

Opera is not going to break your computer.

Dark_Side

It really depends, but google can certainly be your friend in these cases. How old is the box, is it a Dell, Gateway, etc? I've had those kinds of errors before and it can be anything from bad mouse drivers, to a corrupted windows install. Simplest scenario I've usually found for really bad problems is to simply reinstall windows and pray, but that's a fairly severe solution. If you do it though, you may want to partition your hard drive so that in the future you can reinstall windows with impunity. If you're going to be upgrading most of the system anyway, you may have to just completely build from scratch because different chip configurations, pci-e vs. agp, power supply requirements, and the like tend to force complete upgrades.

TechBoy

Are we talking random blue screens every few minutes, no matter what you're doing?

Last time that happened to me, it was cause my hard drive was in its death throes. A couple of weeks later and it was kaput.

If you haven't already, go about backing up your data.

august

1) backup you data
2) reformat