irql_not_less_or_equal BSOD due to overheat?

Went to bed last night, temps were normal - had a few torrents running, taking up 1% or so of cpu each, and explorer was taking a couple of %. Didn't have any virus scans scheduled. I wake up today and get that message. Usually, its caused by me having xp sp2 installed and having a network device enabled - i can fix it by disabling netbios, but you can't do that in safe mode, and you can't do it in time during normal startup before the BSOD occurs. Is this an overheating problem, or do i need a fresh windows install? (used the same ghost image about 4 times)

Mostlikely a driver issue.
Drivers conflict during startup.

I've seen that type of error occur when memory was failing. It might be a rather generic type though. Did you get this at startup or did you leave your computer on during the night? Assuming the latter, it seems unlikely to be due to overheating if your temps were fine before and you weren't even running anything that would increase them.

FIZZ3 said:

I've seen that type of error occur when memory was failing. It might be a rather generic type though. Did you get this at startup or did you leave your computer on during the night? Assuming the latter, it seems unlikely to be due to overheating if your temps were fine before and you weren't even running anything that would increase them.

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yep, happened overnight (well, during the day actually, i shift work, but the temperatures were like 2c above usual, not 6c like they are on a hot day). I have 4x512 ddr400 sticks, and unless i'm photoshopping, i barely go over a gig. I was going to run memtestx86, but it was going to take a L O T of time. I'll do it when i have nothing to download. I've had paintshop pro try to use ALL the ram and more, and never got a BSOD... think its still a ram problem?

I got that particlar BSOD error when I was still testing my RAM timings. I had to loosen them up a tiny bit and the problem stopped.

invictius said:

yep, happened overnight (well, during the day actually, i shift work, but the temperatures were like 2c above usual, not 6c like they are on a hot day). I have 4x512 ddr400 sticks, and unless i'm photoshopping, i barely go over a gig. I was going to run memtestx86, but it was going to take a L O T of time. I'll do it when i have nothing to download. I've had paintshop pro try to use ALL the ram and more, and never got a BSOD... think its still a ram problem?

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Yes it seems unlikely that an idling system could trigger a RAM error, but it might happen. Memtest runs a number of operations in memory, and even when your memory has a fault somewhere, it may only show in one particular test. So that could explain why PSP, even though it was using all the RAM, ran fine.

FIZZ3 said:

I've seen that type of error occur when memory was failing. It might be a rather generic type though. Did you get this at startup or did you leave your computer on during the night? Assuming the latter, it seems unlikely to be due to overheating if your temps were fine before and you weren't even running anything that would increase them.

Click to expand...

I've only got that BSOD from faulty ram