Cold Start lockups? This has happened to me before...

[Dinger]

Just wondering what causes it.
Gigabyte GA-7vrx (VIA KT266A or something) MB/ T-Bird 1.4
768 Megs of Crucial Ram
Radeon 64 DDR ViVO
SB Audigy
Hayes Hardware Modem
Maxtor 80 Gig ATA133 HD
DVD drive
CD burner

Here's the symptoms right now:


I've had crashing problems for a while.
I did a windows XP system repair (which really f#d up my system). I found some bad ram and replaced it.  Updated all the drivers (including an absolute ream of anything ATI ever stuck on my HD or registry). Flashed the BIOS.  Turned off virtual memory.
It still locks up.
One of the crashes I get is now pretty regular:
when the machine is cold, I fire it up and about ten minutes into the session it freezes, often with an IRQ EQUAL OR LESS error.
Reboot and it works fine when "Hot", often for 12-hour hauls.
I haven't tried it with anything too stressful recently, but iirc moving large amounts of video data around would cause trouble.

Any ideas?

This has happened before with an old 486 laptop. When the machine got old, I would turn it on in the morning.  It would lock up right after the POST; I'd come back up 30 minutes later with it good and hot, and it'd work okay, occasionally locking up when scrolling panes.

Did I cook the vid card?

[Dinger]

sorry that would be an IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

[WizOfClay]

Hi Dinger,

I'm not an expert or anything, but I was curious about the error message as well so I did a search of it on google and found a few sites that explained what the error message was.  Found this site (a Microsoft TechNet site) which explains the message and possible solutions for resolving the problem.

Hope it helps you out.

[Dinger]

yeah. I found something like that this morning, that had a detailed troubleshooting routine, with about 12 steps, and the note "Reinstall Windows XP after every step".
Uhh... Dang.  I was hoping for something easy.
anyway, it only trashes on startup...