Pandaman

Forgive me if this has already been posted, I always seem to encounter things whose keywords are too short to be searched on this forum =P

My problem is pretty simple. Two days ago, I got a BSOD with that lovely IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL message. I know usually this indicates a problem with memory, but since I assembled this machine in January with solid components, it seems unlikely that it just randomly decided to die, and so soon. I've been trying to troubleshoot the problem because now Firefox is crashing when visiting sites I've always been able to visit, sometimes to the point where I can't even restore my session.

Checking through my event history it seems the only thing that changed recently was about a week ago I installed the 9.8 catalysts. The strange thing is that it worked without any hitches until the 30th, and I've had 5 blue screens since then. After some checking around, I had someone suggest I find out which IRQ my graphics card is on and see if it's shared with too much stuff or something. I kinda thought IRQ sharing was a problem of a long, long time ago (and do PCI-Express graphics cards even get IRQs? I dunno) but I checked anyway. And here's what I found:



Apparently I'm on... IRQ negative two? That can't be good. When I actually look at the properties of the card, I see this:



Something tells me my IRQ shouldn't be expressed in hexadecimals. Is it possible that my drivers are all fubar'd and I'll have to reinstall everything? Is there something in the BIOS that randomly got set badly so I'm not getting an IRQ anymore? Any ideas at all? I'm stumped. ^^;

mkk

The IRQ at "-2" is okay and the blue screen message IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL isn't really related to these IRQ's but rather a general instability indicator as you've experienced before. You could always try reverting to an older driver but I'm guessing it's more likely a hardware instability problem. Been tweaking any of the system BIOS settings recently? Run some memory test software like Windows's own (in Vista/Win7) or other. Also check fans of course.

Pandaman

First off, yeah, I knew that the weird Stop message isn't actually IRQ related, but that did seem weird to me... in the interrim I asked my roommate what his said (and he has the same setup as me) and it said the same thing so I know now that that isn't the problem.

What's strange is I managed to run good 'ol memtest86 and the first time I did it, within 30 seconds, there were memory errors all over the place. I had to run out and do some stuff so I couldn't mess with it then, but when I came back a few hours later there were no problems even all the way through the test. I'm thinking maybe one of the contacts was loose or something so I reseated all my ram (and swapped their slots) and I'm going to see if I have any more problems from here on out.

Thanks for the response! ^_^