Crash (XP Pro, SR1)

[tmd39]

I got an email from my stepdaughter, who is at university 3 hours away, reporting a crash on her new machine. This machine is an HP with AMD Athlon that came with WIN XP Home installed, which I upgraded to XP Pro, and on which I installed Office XP Pro.

She reports:

<hr>While I was out of my dorm room, my computer blacked out and then a blue screen came up saying to save something to a hard disk (according to my roommate) and it said to shut it down if this has never happened before and if it does again to save it to a hard disk. OK. Well, when I got there an error message was up saying that I should report the error to microsoft. so I clicked send report, and this is the "analysis" they gave me.

Analysis Information

Thank you for submitting an error report. The error was likely caused by:

A hardware failure reported by your Central Processing Unit (CPU)

This behavior occurs because your computer processor detected an unrecoverable hardware error and reported it to Windows. For more information, contact the manufacturer of your computer.<hr>

Those references to CPU and hardware are pretty scary to me. I told her to let me know if anything more happens, with as much detail as she can provide, and meanwhile to be sure to save her work to disk, and to talk to her school's IT guys if it starts to act up again - but those IT guys don't have a real good reputation.

Any thoughts?

[cowboydawg]

I found this:

Machine check exceptions are frequently caused by one of the following conditions:
#1.Running the processor or mainboard beyond its specifications. For example, overclocking the processor or bus. Microsoft recommends that you run your hardware at the manufacturer-rated speeds.
#2.Noisy power, overstressed power strips, outmatched power supplies and failing power supplies can destabilize your computer. Make sure that you have a stable, reliable power supply to your computer.
#3.Extreme thermal conditions caused by the failure of cooling devices such as fans. Make sure your cooling devices are all working.
#4.Damaged memory, or memory that is not the correct type for your computer. If you recently changed the memory configuration, revert to the previous configuration to determine what is wrong. Make sure that you are using the correct memory for your computer.

These especially hold true since she wasn't using it when it happened. Two things I suspected from above were a Power Faliure or Surge, and possible Proccessor Overheating. AMD has been known to do that. Check to make sure the CPU fan is running and you might ask her to power down for an hour or two, power back up and see if it takes longer for the Freeze or Blue Screen to happen. If so that points toward overheating.

[tmd39]

Hmmm. We bought her an Uninterruptible Power Supply that I never had a chance to look at before she took off for school. I don't know much about them - ought to have one of my own but don't, of course - so I don't know if it might have configuration issues - so I probably should have her ask her IT folks to check the installation of that, do you think?

And, yeah, I'll suggest she power-down overnight or while she's in class.

Thanks!