Well the worst things have been happening… My PC has been blue screen of deathing or BSODing. When this happens it usually means that SOMETHING is going wrong on the PC… Which great right? This 1500 dollar PC is dying… Just what you like to see.
What did I do to investigate the issues? There are plenty of diagnostic tools that Windows has to help troubleshoot. A few I have used from Windows for this have been WinDbg, Chkdsk, SFC, DISM, and mdcheck. I also used MemTest86 for some RAM testing
WinDbg
Windows debug contains multiple tools for troubleshooting. I was mostly working with the dumpcheck functionality. When your machine BSOD it should create a dump file. Which if you open it, you won’t be able to read. It’s basically in hieroglyphs. Utilizing WinDbg you can run an analysis on the file. Now, I didn’t personally know what it all meant, but using ChatGPT helped a lot. I did notice right away in the BSOD itself it was saying something about memory management issues. Great. After analyzing the dumpfile and consulting with the great ChatGPT. It sounded like it was a RAM issue.
Google also suggested running a command to basically make your PC BSOD to find any errors. So I ran the command “verifier” and my PC BSOD right away and pointed to some driver issues. But, after trying to fix those issues I decided “It’s probably just a RAM issue.”
ChkDsk
ChkDsk is also a good tool to run for troubleshooting your hard disks for any issues. Luckily for me when I ran this command it came back clean, thankfully. So, this means that the disks are good. GOTTA BE THE RAM :(.
SFC
System File Check is another tool that can be used to identify any issues with other files in your system. Some will say that it doesn’t do anything and that they have never found anything using this tool. I think I have on a laptop that was from 2014 that I did a SFC on a couple of months back. But, yeah up to you if you think it would be helpful. It can’t hurt, that’s why I did it. May as well check the boxes for everything.
DISM
DISM is a windows image checker. So it checks to make sure that your windows image is in good working order and if it isn’t it can repair the system for you. I have seen this work pretty well in the past, however, in this case it showed clean for my machine. Again, all pointing to the RAM issue. But need to check the boxes.
MdCheck
MdCheck is a Windows Memory check. It does some initial evaluation of your RAM. This was the first time I ran this as I usually use Memtest86. But, since it is built into Windows I thought I would give it a shot. It did identify an error with my memory… what we figured. But, it doesnt really give you any information about the issue. Just says it found one… Great help thanks.
Memtest86
Memtest86 is a great third party tool that you can make a boot drive and boot into it and it will run in depth memory tests on your RAM. Some devices have this built into their systems, for example my supermicro servers have Memtest86 built in. So, you can just boot straight to it without making a boot drive. Making a boot drive for your USB is pretty easy overall, just download the image from Memtest86 and use a tool like balenaetcher and you are off to the races.
This test did show that I have a lot of errors in my RAM.
What now?
I went out and bought brand new RAM sticks and tested using the Memtest86 and the mdcheck. The results were clear, my old RAM failed. I have no idea why it decided to fail but, it failed. I have never seen RAM fail that bad in only 4 years of running. But, hey it happened and now I will limp this PC along until I can upgrade everything to newer gear.
Stay Curious. Stay Strong
Joe
P.S Computers suck
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