Vista - Constant BSOD and freezing

Hi all,

This may turn out to be a long post, so please bear with me, I'll try to keep it short

About 3 weeks ago I purchased a Sony Vaio vgn-390 laptop. From day 2 the computer started freezing on websites, mainly ones with alot of graphics and videos.

Before I get to far into the problems, let me list some specs:
Vista Home Premium x64 SP1
Intel Core 2 duo T9800 2.93 GHz
4 GBs RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650


So anyways, I first thought that some software was causing this, in particular Windows Live OneCare (the only other thing that was installed at the time was iTunes), so I uninstalled OneCare, and alas the problems continued. After a few days the freezes turned into BSODs. The only error messages I remember is IRQL_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL (I forget the code) and SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION (0x000003b). I did a complete system restore, and the computer was fine for a day or two, and again started the same problems.

So in total I have done 2 complete system restores (from the original configuration, not from a restore point). The freezes happen at what seems to be random times, from any place on the internet, to when I'm playing a game, to just messing around with any other installed program.

I have a little bit more experience than an average person with a computer, and I've tried everything I know of to fix this. I've checked the sony support site for updated drivers and the only one I found was for the network driver.


I'm sure I have left out some crucial details and I apologize. If anybody has any ideas of where I should start looking for whats wrong, that would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks guys.

Bad buggy driver, or ram issue

Check your memory with Vista memory diagnostic Tool (search for memory in start search bar)

Ok. Thanks. I forgot to mention that sony has a preloaded hardware diagnostic tool that I ran and everything seemed to check out. But I will check that out as soon as I get off work and will post the results.

I ran the memory diagnostic tool and there were no errors found. Is there a way to test the drivers to look for a bad driver?



**EDIT**
I ran the driver verifier tool and all the drivers checked out as verified and signed by MS.

(Self-plagiarism) "...you may see some recent files with a DMP extension in the \windows\minidump folder on that machine - one for each of the reboots. They're memory dumps each corresponding to one crash/reboot sequence.

If you copy a few of the latest DMPs out of that folder and into another directory, then zip them up and upload them here, someone might be able to analyse them for you and tell you precisely why the machine is crashing and rebooting. "

I attached two dmp files. Those are the only two that were in the folder which was weird because I know that the computer has crashed more than that lately...

Try updating your Zone Alarm installation. If that doesn't help, try removing it long enough to see whether it makes a substantial difference.

Your two dumps are substantially different and it's possible you've got multiple distinct problems.

lookup your interrupt requests tell me whats on IRQ 0 , thats the first one the second seems to point to Zonealarm , thats probably whats freezing your internet

IRQ is not IRQL. That's a common misconception. IRQL_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL means paged or invalid memory was touched by a driver while the kernel prioritisation level (the Interrupt Request Level - IRQL) was higher than or equal to 2. That's a problem because the dispatcher (the part of the OS which determines which thread to run next) itself runs at IRQL=2 and the box is effectively in a deadlock which results in a BSOD.

Thank you ill never remember all that but i learn something new every day