Won't ... Die ...

This weekend, I've been tussling with a series of unfortunate events.
I helped a client with a HP Vista PC on Friday; it was blue-screen dead nearly every time he tried to start it (required multiple tries to actually boot successfully). I looked at it, and it held many minidumps (little state files written in a crash), each pointing to one of a few crash codes. Fairly common were PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA (0x50) and MEMORY_MANAGEMENT (0x1A). So, I'm thinking, "Uh-oh, new RAM time."

The PC became more and more unstable as I worked on it, to the point where pretty much any process would puke right up and die. I ran SpinRite for a few hours, and MemTest86 overnight. All the hardware looked fine.

Having already saved all the important user data to a network drive, I nuked the PC. I selected HP Restore (reformat and reinstall from recovery partition) and killed the beast.

I'm re-installing security apps and such right now. I don't have the client's copy of Office 2007, so we'll do that tomorrow. Hopefully, that will solve that.

In summary, the PCs I work on skew toward XP (75%), Vista (20%), and Win98 (5%... why won't they upgrade....?) Of the Vista machines, this is the first time I've seen an OS install go so horribly wrong. Of course, it is possible that the client did something of epic bone headedness to cause the errors (in my experience, most fatal errors are self-inflicted), but its a little late now. After I'm done with it, he shouldn't have to muck around at all.