For a week now I have been getting random restarts, as well as Blue Screens of Death. This seemed to be happening after I updated to the latest Avast version. (I tried updating again, and it’s literally the current update) This is on Home edition.
Anyway, I first got the Blue Screen with the STOP: 0x000008E Error “Dumping physical memory to disk” and then a restart. So I had an Idea it might be my RAM. I took one of my sticks out (I have 2gb) and started up again. The computer ran fine for 2 days. So I figured it was that bad RAM stick and ordered 2 new ones (did not receive them yet)
However, just today I got another blue screen. The error was different, though: PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA 0X00000050 “beggining dump of physical memory” then a reboot and here I am.
Since I researched it a little bit, these Blue Screens can be caused by literally anything…but I’m not expert. So I’m trying process of elimination, here. I have noticed there is a way to upload a minidump file that can possibly show if it is Avast causing this problem? I don’t know how to do this.
The only other software I have installed since the Avast update is the latest Nvidia drivers for my GeForce 7900GS.
Any help is appreciated, and please let me know If any other information is needed…
That is the problem any BSOD will automatically do a dump of memory in the vain hope that someone might be able to analyse the memory dump to try and find out what the problem might be. They a) need the analysis tools and b) the knowledge to interpret the memory.dmp file.
Searching on the Stop error code normally produces many hits and not many of them are very user friendly.
Uploading to the ftp area is only to be don on the request of one of the Alwil team, as it isn’t routinely monitored, so hopefully one of the Alwil team will pick up on this.
How long have you had avast ?
Have (or did) you another AV installed in this system, if so what was it and how did you get rid of it ?
You could try a clean reinstall:
Download the latest version of avast http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html and save it to your HDD, somewhere you can find it again. Use that when you reinstall.
Download the avast! Uninstall Utility, find it here and save it to your HDD.
Now uninstall (using add remove programs, if you can’t do that start from the next step), reboot.
run the avast! Uninstall Utility, reboot. If step 1 failed it may be necessary to run this from safe mode, once complete reboot into normal mode.
Antivirus applications also use drivers as does multiple other applications (firewall, etc.) and security ones operate at a low level and could clash if more than one AV is installed or remnants left after uninstall.
It is a little after 2a.m. and I’m about to call it a night, hopefully that will give you more to go on.
Thanks again. I ran the AVG remover as well. It seemed to ‘remove’ it, I guess it still had remnants left over.
We’ll see how it goes.
I’m actually going to leave Avast uninstalled and see if I get a blue screen within a day. That way I can eliminate it as a culprit alltogether if I do get one.
Would you be able to upload the huge dump to our FTP (ftp://ftp.avast.com/incoming)? That might tell us what’s going on there…
For the start, the small minidump file (from Windows\Minidump) folder might be enough.
Good morning, slothkore!
System crashed during memory allocation process - would it be possible to test your memory with memtest tool? Just download ISO file (http://www.memtest.org/#downiso) burn and boot from the CD. Please note you have to test the memory some hours, just ONE test loop is not enough. Please let us know if you find something! Thanks.
I will have to try that, however I am getting brand new RAM tomorrow. So I might just put that in instead. Hopefully that is the problem, and I can go back to using Avast again.
