BSOD while surfing.

fredu999

New Member
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1
Hi.

I'm working as an intern in a small computer store and being new to fixing computers makes it difficult for me to figure out what's wrong with a clients computer. She said she got a bluescreen while surfing and not doing anything . Nobody working here seems to know what the problem is either. I've tested the memory and harddrive and no problems come up. It also has not crashed in the time I've looked at it (2 days).
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8.1
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
This particular dump file shows that taskhost.exe (the process that runs scheduled tasks) triggered a crash, and this happened because the memory manager attempted to free a page that was supposed to exist in RAM, and that address was invalid. It's important to note that no userland process (unless it's 32bit and does something called AWE) on a Windows system knows anything at all about RAM - it's all virtual address space provided to the process, so a userland app cannot directly cause this to happen. However, because memory requests via the memory manager are handled in kernel, when a page fault occurs when accessing a memory address, it causes a bugcheck, because no page faults can happen when the memory manager is accessing pages. It's possible that a driver is freeing memory and not marking it as such, but that doesn't happen very often. It's more likely that there's a hardware problem on the system, but you should target software first. Update video/audio/chipset drivers to the latest supported versions by the hardware vendor, update the BIOS (if a new version is available), make sure the OS is up to date with all security patches, and run malware scans to make sure it's free of malicious software which could potentially trigger such behaviors.

After that, test hardware to make sure the RAM passes thorough memory tests (memtestx86+), the CPU doesn't fail under stress (Prime95), the hard disks don't report any SMART errors (hddguardian), and if the system has a dedicated video card (aka not Intel onboard video) it doesn't fail stress testing either (furmark).

There's not much more you can do than that short of making sure the system is configured for a complete memory dump, and gather one the next time a crash occurs.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8.1 x64
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    Custom
    CPU
    Intel Core i7 4790K @ 4.5GHz
    Motherboard
    Asus Maximus Hero VII
    Memory
    32GB DDR3
    Graphics Card(s)
    Nvidia GeForce GTX970
    Sound Card
    Realtek HD Audio
    Hard Drives
    1x Samsung 250GB SSD
    4x WD RE 2TB (RAIDZ)
    PSU
    Corsair AX760i
    Case
    Fractal Design Define R4
    Cooling
    Noctua NH-D15
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