Hi - I'm struggling to get to the bottom of a Blue Screen of Death problem I'm having at the moment. Randomly, Windows XP will freeze and display a BSOD that reads "***Hardware Malfunction".

The problem is pretty random and hard to replicate, but seems to be more likely to occur if I run Photoshop or Illustrator (versus just using Firefox, Outlook and Word as is normal for my computer). It also gets more frequent if I use eDonkey - possibly due to CPU load...? Any ideas? Does Photoshop/Illustrator use RAM or CPU in an unusual way that could help isolate the problem? I've run Memtest and my DDR module seems ok..

have you tried to underclock your system
e.g. by lowering the FSB
for testing purposes

what about temps?
(i´m having freezes during gaming because of heat, in normal use there´s no prob)

Temps: They're fine - ambient system temp is 30C, CPU 40C.
Underclocking: Not tried that yet - what would it prove if it sorted the freezes - that there's something wrong with the CPU specifically?

any chance to get the error/stop code?
0x00000079 or something?

totally random crashes are in most cases due to somekind of system instability
und if it occurs most under heavy CPU usage CPU and RAM are the 2 direct suspects
underclocking can be done very easy with one change in BIOS and if it works you have your problem

That's the prob - the WinXP BSOD doesn't give any details. It just says:

***Hardware Malfunction

Please contact your manufacturer.

***Your system is halted

It's a bit odd I don't get an error code... and annoying

Microsoft´s KB about that [url=http://support.microsoft.com/kb/222973/en-us/]Prob[/ur]

what u can try:
install the latest official driver for all the devices u can
bios update if possible
underclock ur sys
run memtest for 24h and more
try another RAM (incompatible?!)



what hardware are you using?
ram , cpu , etc ?

I think I've tracked the problem down to some generic RAM... it's been running fine in the system for about a year, but now that I've replaced it with Crucial the crashes have become far less frequent/stopped altogether (fingers crossed!)

Anyone want to buy a 512MB stick of DDR2700...?