Monday, March 17, 2014

Windows 7 & 8: Blue Screen Of Death - Memory Management

Some time ago my main computer started to BSOD on me at different times and for no obvious reason. I was then running Windows 7 and thought it was a buggy driver that caused the problem so I decided to upgrade to Windows 8 instead and hopefully get rid of the problem. With Windows 8 installed the computer worked like a charm, for a while, then the dreaded BSODs was back. Most of the times the BSOD-message was about "MEMORY_MANAGEMENT" or "PFN_LIST_CORRUPT" so I thought I might have a bad memory module and ran Memtest86 at several occasions, but the tests were always good.

Still expecting bad drivers I continuously tried to manually update all drivers but some were tricky to find so I came across SlimDrivers-Free, an application that scan your computer's drivers and automatically download any updates. With all drivers updated the computer still BSODed intermittently.

Searching the net I discovered that I wasn't the only one with healthy memory modules and "MEMORY_MANAGEMENT" BSODs. I read in a forum somewhere that someone recommended increasing the voltage of the RAM, so I tried it out and increased it from 1.8V to 1.82V, and since then I haven't had any BSOD!  Well, I actually got one but that was because of a crashed harddrive and not due to memory corruption.

By writing this post I probably ask for trouble (Murphy's law you know...), but I like living on the edge! :)


2014-03-29:   Oh crap. Just got a Memory Management BSOD again. I guess I'm back to square 1. :(
2014-04-20:   Hmm... no BSOD since last time, my machine still works much better than before the memory voltage increase.

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