Crash with blue screen.

Have you plugged anything new in such as mouse or anything, I got this a few times after I plugged my HD PVR2 and when I uninstalled it no more crashes.

Just googling the Kernel Stack inpage error, read a few articles one was a loose ribbon to the harddrive, and another possible fix was to run chkdsk to see if you have a bad sector in the harddrive.

Edit: loose not lose.

t2sink is right.. this error is typically caused by a hardware driver having issues in some form. It may not be a drive, per se, but a drive's cable coming lose is a pretty common cause of this one for people who fiddle with the internals quite a bit or are rough with their system, but there's a detail in the numbers at the bottom that somewhat rules this out and I'll detail it in the last paragraph. If you haven't been tossing your machine around the room (like I do on the weekends when I'm sober), and haven't been fiddling with the cables I wouldn't worry -too much- about that and would focus on other things first. I'll assume you're running SP3 or SP4, so I won't mention it.

Drivers may be up to date, but some things won't be updated by Windows Update - such as your motherboard's BIOS. You have an Asus board (I <3 Asus boards) - and they have a utility on their website that will easily update your BIOS if needed.

If there isn't an update for your BIOS, or the issue persists after updating I would attempt to do a reinstall of all of the drivers for the hardware in your computer - it's extremely possible that one of them has become corrupt for some reason or another. Failing that, cables would be next on the list. If those don't fix your issue I'd recommend having someone look at the .dmp file created by the BSoD to help diagnose what -exactly- the issue is.

Without the dump file, the only info that I can tell you about the error, is that the specific error is a STATUS_IO_DEVICE_ERROR and is usually (but not always) caused by: defective cabling of SCSI based devices (you probably don't have a SCSI drive, most home computers don't), two devices trying to use the same IRQ (could be bios or hardware driver related), boot sector virus (unlikely), not being updated to the latest service pack (or at least SP3). Those are the most probable reasons for the BSoD, but others aren't completely ruled out.

I think its dying a slow and painful death, invest in new pc best way, steer clear of windows 8 though, caused me nothing but trouble

Bah, I dislike it when tools just say "Bad" without giving a reason. A HDTune screenshot would provide better information about the S.M.A.R.T. status of your drives - if you would.

For the .dmp file, click Start -> Run, type drwtsn32.exe -- it'll have a path labeled as "Crash Dump:" that'll tell you where the files are.

Drives look okay to me - not great, but I wouldn't say doom is imminent. Drive 1 I wouldn't be using for storing sensitive data, but in its current state I wouldn't expect it to stop working, say, tomorrow or even next week/month.

I don't have an XP virtual machine handy, but I seem to recall a path of Windows\Minidumps -- check to see if you have some .dmp files in there.

It wouldn't hurt to replace it - or even just move it out of being the primary drive (extra HD space for stuff you don't mind losing, woot!). That might fix your BSoD issue right up as well.

That one is a bit more damning than the previous, because it's a general error and trying to diagnose it is ... difficult (putting it very lightly). Most often cause is a piece of hardware that is in its death throws, though judging on the HDTune screens I'd be surprised if it's a hard drive. If you get that one again note down the hex numbers at the bottom after the word STOP - it'll give a bit more details, but nothing that is going to tell us exactly what the issue is. Based on the two BSoD's I'd say there's definitely a piece of hardware that is about to go kaput.

First thing I'd check is RAM: http://www.memtest86.com/ (you can download it for free) - I'd let it run overnight (6-8hrs).

You can test the hard drives using vendor-specific tools.

Samsung: http://www.majorgeeks.com/Samsung_Drive_Diagnostic_Utility_Hutil_d5769.html
Hitachi: http://www.majorgeeks.com/IBM_-_Hitachi_Drive_Fitness_Test_d2828.html

Other than that, not a lot of diagnostic work can be done with software. However, if you can eliminate those three as possible suspects then really there's not a whole lot left that could be dying, as much of the things that are left would be on the motherboard. For graphics card you really have to revisit your last few weeks/months with the card. If it seems like you've had more issues recently that are graphics related (ie: stuttering, slow redraws, tearing, etc) then graphics card is a strong suspect. CPU can't really be tested without proper tools, same for PSU. If you eliminate everything except for the motherboard, CPU and PSU then it'd be best to just get a new system (you'd pretty much have to, since you MB/CPU aren't really sold anywhere anymore). If you're upgrading to a new board and chip, you might as well get a new PSU also.

Hello,

Oh, I'm jumping in too late, I see.
Indeed, most likely a hardware issue, seen the fact that your PC, Lady ElDi, well... it's not... how to say this... it's just an old piece of . Oops! Did I just say that out loud?

S.M.A.R.T. isn't always very accurate though. For how long have you been using this HDD, did you say?

Lady ElDi wrote:Hi Admin,

It's an old piece, I'll give you that, but given the fact that it still runs and, most of the time, it runs without issue, it's most certainly no piece of

Well, what can I say. The oldest folder on my D drive (the 250 one) dates back to June 2007, but I've had it longer than that. Not sure how long but I'd say, since '05? Longer? Don't know.
The other one.... I think it survived at least 3 or 4 hardware,n which I did every 2-3 years. Back when I got it, 80GB was a lot. I want to say since 2001/2002. But I'm not sure.

Lady ElDi,

Oh my. Definately time for a newer HDD! (I hate old hardware, I'm afraid)

I'd expect that one to be one of the following:

- Bus error [motherboard]
- RAM
- Any piece of hardware that utilizes a cache (ie: CPU)

Kinda makes you wish Microsoft would put more details in the blue screens huh?

You could, but see that's the difficulty with Machine Exception Codes - they're very vague and the information in a dump file could be very misleading even to the experts. To get a good diagnosis without using the diagnostic tools (or maybe better phrased would be: even if the diagnostic tools show no issues) you would pretty much have to give it to someone who is certified by Microsoft or the hardware manufacturer(s) to handle such things [they obviously wouldn't -need- to be, but they probably -would- be], and they would likely need no less than a week to give it a proper diagnosis.

Some things you can try while waiting for the cd:
- Start -> Run -> cmd -> chkdisk
- defragging the hard drives
- Reinstall all hardware drivers that you can (note: not updating, remove and install again - side note: Asus's website will have many of the drivers you'll need at one place for easy downloading)
- Removing expansions 1-by-1 to see if it's an expansion that has been corrupted. Note that you don't actually have to uninstall the expansion - just removing the registry keys for the expansion in HKLM\Software\Sims will force the game to think the expansion isn't installed. If you get all the way down to having just the base game and no expansions you could try reinstalling the base game. If it stops before you get that far you could try reinstalling the expansion that made it go away. -- I'm not sure about this idea, becuase I'm not sure if you get a blue screen -every time- you try to play, or just sometimes. I also have doubts about the game randomly (and suddenly) becoming corrupt - even taking into account that you've had a number of BSoDs in recent history.