Regular Monthly Blue Screen

Clinical Waste

I have a XP-pro PC built about 18 months ago (Abit IT7max board, p4 2.26, 1Gb Corsair memory, SB Audigy, GF4 4400, NTL cable modem, TDK 48x writer, 2x 80Gb WD 8mb drives etc....)

Now it runs sweet 99% of the time but about once every 4-6 weeks it bluescreens on startup (irq something) -between the loading windows screen and the login screen. Rebooting continues to bluescreen, unless I remove the 1394 connector (attached to Abit front panel) from the mobo and remove the ac plug from back of PC.

Plug in power again and hey, no more blue screens, until next month or so.

This is so random and so infrequent I haven't been too bothered except that the not knowing is really annoying!!!

Mobo, chip, memory, pioneer DVD player the only parts not upgraded during this time and the fault has always been there.


Any ideas would be appreciated.
A windows thing or purely hardware ???

fatmander

An IRQ's in it's simplest form is a request from the Hardware to the Chip for resourses.
In medival times(before Plug and play) you had to manually set devices so that each device had 1 exclusive devoted IRQ(0-15),
when you ran out, you couldn't add another device until you disabled one of the IRQ's already in use

Windows XP &2K both use IRQ's completly differently than win9x

XP 'n 2K use the 'HAL', and 'virtual IRQ', thousands of them, so that you aren't supposed to run out, and they can share a single IRQ between different devices, all under the supervision of the HAL (operating system).
Your Cards and Devices are now assigned onto virtual IRQ's by windows(ACPI)
Some older cards do not like to be moved onto these virtual IRQ's,
On my last 2K box, I had the same problem. After a look in device manager, all my plug and play devices were all running virtually on IRQ 9.
I spent ages trying to fix it, in the end I just wiped it


There are many opinions what causes 'driver IRQL not less or equal'
first make sure , "this is a PnP OS" is enabled in BIOS +ACPI is on(you need to reformat to change it)
Feeling brave, flash your bios

Can then most likely be any of the following
Anything by Creative
Detonator drivers for gforce card(especially 23.xx)
Unsigned drivers on any hardware
VIA Chipsets
iomega/via conflicts
Bad memory
Overheating(unlikely for you as it happens at boot)



Basically everyone is blaming everyone else
IMO, wipe it if you get sick of rebooting

Clinical Waste

There are many opinions what causes 'driver IRQL not less or equal'

Actually this is not the message I get. I did get this when I first buikt the machine. Changed CAS latency down to 2.5 and problem never returned. (Changed it back to 2 once and it blue screened straight away)

Can then most likely be any of the following:
Anything by Creative -have an Audigy alright but it used to be a SB5.1 platinum -problem existed for both.

Detonator drivers for gforce card(especially 23.xx) -have a GF4 4400 with detonator drivers but it used to be a Radeon9700pro, and before that a Radeon7500 -problem existed for all.

Unsigned drivers on any hardware -only for the Abit Media Panel
so a definite possibility.

VIA Chipsets -None

iomega/via conflicts -No zip drive

Bad memory -?maybe especially in light of memory problem mentioned above. Sure I tested the memory out singularly at the time though. But maybe should re-check. I have other memory I can replace and check. Problem is test will have to run for 4-6 weeks. (8 to be sure if nothing happens.)

Overheating(unlikely for you as it happens only at boot)

Thanks for that advice. Appreciate it.

(will also post the exact error message next time I see it)