7E bluescreen when booting Vista x64 (with 4GB only)

[Peter Haumer]

Hi.
I have a Dell XPS 710 that ran WinXP (32bit) so far with 4GB installed with
no problems four 5 months. Have GForce 8, XFi SB, one SATA and one PATA
drive.

Got myself a second SATA hard disk drive to install Vista x64 that I want to
use via dual boot. When booting from DVD I immediately got a "STOP:
0x0000007E" (plus four parameters, no additional lines below) blue screen.
I removed 2GB and the install worked fine. Installed all Windows Updates
and latest 64bit drivers that I could find for my configuration. Rebooted
several times without any problems during that process. Then I placed the
other 2GB memory back into my machine and the same blue screen came back
when now booting my Vista 64 drive. The XP drive still works fine. Got
myself a whole new set of 4 1GB dimms: same blue screen; each and every time
I try to boot. When I remove 2GB it works fine. I also tested two 2GB in
the different dimm slots (i.e. 1 and 3 populated and 2 and 4 populated):
worked great. Just not with 4GB. Dell said they do not support Vista 64
(after being 3 x 90 min with them on the phone about this already .

Any help or hints on how to get Vista 64 to work with 4GB in my system would
be very much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Best regards,
Peter Haumer.

P.S.: I am an MSDN subscriber and just registered this alias for MSDN
benefits Managed News Groups support. I hope it worked.

 

[Jane C]

Hello Peter,

Do you have the latest BIOS update?

 

[Peter Haumer]

Hello Jane.
Yes. Also tried different types of bios options such as switching off dual
core or HDD noise levels (?).
I actually just tried something crazy: I kept 3GB in the machine and that
worked, too. Put the fourth dimm back: bsod.

Peter.

 

[Morgan]

Even though you have written that the 4x1GB sticks worked perfectly well
with XP (32bit) by the nature of the limits of that OS not all of that
memory was being addressed anyway, whether that makes a difference or not to
the following I'm not sure...

When you populate a motherboard with four sticks of RAM rather than 2 AFAIK
it can place more strain on your memory controller and to compensate for
this it is often found that lowering your memory timings will help. Even
though each individual memory stick may have a spd rating of (for example)
4-4-4-12 when ran with all 4 memory slots full it can mean that timings of
5-5-5-18 are needed for stability. Even if you bought 2x2GB sticks of memory
they would have slower timings than 2x1GB.

If you are only relying on the spd value to set the memory timings in the
BIOS then the above problem could well apply. Also make sure that you have
set the correct voltage for the memory sticks. Again for example a
particular Gigabyte board defaults to 1.8v and some sticks need 2.1v and so
an increase of 0.3v is needed.

You could use a copy of memtest to ensure that the memory has no fault,
ensuring first that the above is not a problem.

I assume that the memory is approved as being compatible for your system...?

 

[Peter Haumer]

Thanks a lot Morgan.
This is very interesting. Unfortunately, I could not find a way to change
timing or voltage in the Dell bios.

Yes, I purchase the memory as well as the 4 new gigs from Dell specifically
for this system. I also ran the Dell and Microsoft memory tests on both 4gig
configurations with success.

Thanks and best regards,
Peter Haumer.

 

[Guest]

There is an update from microsoft that fixes this problem. You need to boot
with 2gb and then install the vista update. After install, you can then put
back the extra ram.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929777/en-us

Hope that helps

 

[Peter Haumer]

Hello Jonathan.
Thanks for the reply. I have seen this KB article, but my issue seems to be
something else. Installing the patch did not help. I also get a different
STOP message.

Best regards,
Peter.