GS said:
Using XP SP3 with all current updates
I used to only reboot my Dell portable workstation when updates were
done OR once a week to clear memory. For some reason I started getting
notifications about not enough resources for whatever process/task was
trying to run. Once I got the infamous 'blue screen of death'! Seems to
occur within 24 hrs of bootup now. I suspect something is causing memory
to fill up but can't find any evidence as Task Manager shows I have over
half of the total memory (2GB) available.
Is there a utility that I could run to find the culprit?
First, you should be writing down the blue screen info, and
looking up the STOP code here.
http://aumha.org/a/stop.htm
Or, you can use this, if you can find the corresponding .dmp file.
Depending on how your system is configured, you might receive a
small dump file on a crash. If you had done a good job of
mis-configuring the machine (taking it off defaults), then
it's possible to have practically nothing remaining later in
the way of hints. (And that's when it becomes important to
snap a picture of the blue screen.)
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html
If the STOP error has a driver name, so much the better. It could
be a buggy driver.
If I had to guess, I'd say it was a pool memory leak. Pool memory
appears in the Task Manager resource information. But there are also
tools like Poolmon for monitoring it.
(An intro to Pool memory)
http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2009/03/26/3211216.aspx
I've had an experience here with a Pool problem, with something
called NeatVideo. That's a filter available for various video editing
tools. On my WinXP setup, it exhausted pool in about 2 hours. Due
to a slightly better architecture in Windows 8 (and double the physical memory
available), it took 21 hours to tip over Windows 8. When Windows 8 runs
out of pool, Task Manager becomes useless, and about the only rhing
you can do is power off or press reset. A sad testiment to how WinXP
is still better in some respects (Task Manager tends to work better in XP).
I suspect something you added to the machine lately is leaking
Pool memory. There are other possibilities, and perhaps by using
Task Manager or Process Explorer from Sysinternals, you'll get
some idea of where to look. It's either a driver, or something
that adds low level code to the machine (say, one of those
fancy CD editing or repair tools).
In Poolmon, there are pool tags with a four letter identifier.
And then you need to figure out from that "name", which thing
running on the machine owns it and is the culprit. It's important
for the software design, to pick a "nice" four letter name for
the pool being used.
(Poolmon is mentioned in the list here. I don't know if
there are later versions or not. You can do gigabytes of
downloads for nothing, when it comes to hunting down
tools like this... I think this is where my copy came from.)
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=18546
And the "Validation Required" thing has become a PITA. At one
time it worked properly. Now it doesn't (on WinXP). I have to use one
of my other OSes, to get the validation step to work. I thought
I had it fixed, but... apparently not.
Paul
