S
Simon
Something weird is happening on a friend's PC that's got us
scratching our heads. It's begun crashing fairly often,
usually while saving a Word doc, but not always. When it
keels over we get a blue screen with an error message about
memory dumping overlaid with a load of bright green
vertical lines that hide part of the text. These lines are
slightly less than the width of one character, are spaced
about 5-6 characters apart, and are uninterrupted from top
to bottom. This means that the error message can't be read
in full. The other odd thing is that characters in the
error message are being repeated once, so "memory dump" is
coming out as "mmeemmoorryy dduummpp". This repeating
character effect is the only reason we've been able to read
anything in the error message, as the green pinstripes tend
to cover roughly every 5th character.
It's a 2GHz P4 system. OEM version of Windows 2000 Pro
which is up to date with service packs, patches and driver
updates. No conflicts as far as we can tell. No idea what
the motherboard is. Windows is reporting RAM as 228MB,
which sounded like an odd amount so I opened the case for a
look and saw a single module labelled "256MB DDR". Not sure
what's going on there either.
So what's the problem, hardware, software or both? And
what's the solution? Does getting 228MB RAM out of a 256MB
module have anything to do with it, and even if it doesn't
should it be replaced?
Thanks.
scratching our heads. It's begun crashing fairly often,
usually while saving a Word doc, but not always. When it
keels over we get a blue screen with an error message about
memory dumping overlaid with a load of bright green
vertical lines that hide part of the text. These lines are
slightly less than the width of one character, are spaced
about 5-6 characters apart, and are uninterrupted from top
to bottom. This means that the error message can't be read
in full. The other odd thing is that characters in the
error message are being repeated once, so "memory dump" is
coming out as "mmeemmoorryy dduummpp". This repeating
character effect is the only reason we've been able to read
anything in the error message, as the green pinstripes tend
to cover roughly every 5th character.
It's a 2GHz P4 system. OEM version of Windows 2000 Pro
which is up to date with service packs, patches and driver
updates. No conflicts as far as we can tell. No idea what
the motherboard is. Windows is reporting RAM as 228MB,
which sounded like an odd amount so I opened the case for a
look and saw a single module labelled "256MB DDR". Not sure
what's going on there either.
So what's the problem, hardware, software or both? And
what's the solution? Does getting 228MB RAM out of a 256MB
module have anything to do with it, and even if it doesn't
should it be replaced?
Thanks.