My computer keeps randomly throwing in the towel and offering up the new style blue screen of death. Apparently the minidump files will allow someone to diagnose the problem – I have found them but I have no idea what to do with them. Any IT experts on here (I had heard a rumour that everyone on STW was an IT manager…)?

I can’t answer this specific question but whenever I get errors at that level randomly I always remove and reseat the memory as a first check

(I own neither an Orange nor an Audi 🙁 )

I can (probably) pick apart the minidump if you want to send it over.

Thanks, will email it over tomorrow!

BugCheck 139, {3, fffff80010538540, fffff80010538498, 0}

Probably caused by : NETIO.SYS ( NETIO!KfdClassify2+21e )

DEFAULT_BUCKET_ID: VISTA_DRIVER_FAULT

BUGCHECK_STR: 0x139

PROCESS_NAME: chrome.exe

Translating that into something resembling English, it looks like something went wrong at a network level which caused Chrome to explode. First thing I’d be doing with that is looking to see if there are updated network card drivers available for your machine.

It would be interesting to see a couple of other dumps. Consistency in the faults would back up this theory, inconsistency would point more towards something like faulty RAM.

I’ll keep digging. Hold the line please, caller.

From Microsoft,

Cause

Most causes of this bug check tend to be self explanatory and easy to diagnose. One exception is code 3 [which is what we have here], LIST_ENTRY corruption. This type of bug check can be difficult to track down and indicates that an inconsistency has been introduced into a doubly-linked list (detected when an individual list entry element is added to or removed from the list). Unfortunately, the inconsistency is not necessarily detected at the time when the corruption occurred, so some detective work may be necessary to identify the root cause.

Bother.

I think I’d be running a malware scan if I were you, too (and sfc /scannow from a command prompt)

Had this for a while.

I opened up the PC and hoovered out all the dust, no problems since.

I’ll email you a load more of them for comparison’s sake! The computer is only a couple of months old, it’s an all-in-one Dell thing. Bizarrely it didn’t come with wireless (factory outlet bargain) so it has a little USB wireless dongle plugged in which we had kicking around – could that be the issue? Do you think running an ethernet cable might solve it?

I’ll endeavour to do a malware scan on Monday – any you recommend? I did get caught out with a fake version of Chrome when I was setting the PC up but I reset it to factory settings and started again so I’d hope that dealt with it.

I don’t know if it’s worse having a small amount of computer knowledge than being completely clueless? I know just enough to know I know nothing…

could that be the issue?

Could be, hard to say for sure. One way to find out. (-:

any you recommend?

MBAM is a good place to start.

Got a new wireless USB thingie as the old one was an antique and the computer hasn’t crashed since then. However it’s now dropping the internet connection every 10 minutes or so and I have to unplug and replug the dongle to get it back. Aaarghhh!!! Any ideas? I’ve been through power management to make sure it doesn’t get turned off and thought that would solve it but no luck yet.

It’s a Tenda W900U which was well reviewed and when it’s working I have a blue LED flashing, green LED steady. When it stops working I get the green LED but no blue.