Minidump Mystery Solved

I have another system up and running now – Yea! I encountered another problem right off the bat though with Windows XP. My system would reboot after a while (continuously) stating that it was due to a memory dump problem. In this case it turned out to be a minidump issue. While I am still a little fuzzy on why this was occurring, I did find some answers on the web and a final solution as well (I hope).

The first thing I found was that this might be caused by a memory or video card driver incompatibility. I tested my memory with memtest86+ and it was fine. Then I checked my GPU drivers and sure enough they were not correct. I fixed that with an NVIDIA download, but it didn’t stop the problem. My second discovery lead me to Microsoft and I found out that this memory dump problem could be an issue in pre-SP1 XP installations. I have mine updated to SP2, so that was not the issue.

After more searching, and learning, I came across a website that detailed how to shut the memory dump function off. Here is the link (http://barrett.net/xpmemorydump.html) if you want to check out how to do it. I went through the pictured tutorial on the site and magically my system seemed fine again. I ran it through some burn-in type tests and everything checked out okay. I then left it on all night (the real time test) and the system was in perfect functional condition when I got up.