PC Woes: Hardware or Software?

Re: PC Woes: Hardware or Software?

If they're blaming the software, it could be that they've swapped everything that can be swapped hardware-wise and are still getting the same errors.

At that point you have exactly 2 things to blame: the overclocking or the software.

Have they tried undoing the overclocking and going with factory specs for the mobo? Have you or they tried wiping and reinstalling everything on the hard drive?

Re: PC Woes: Hardware or Software?

A third possibility: there could be a piece of hardware that they didn't think to swap (e.g. the power supply) during testing.

Re: PC Woes: Hardware or Software?

Frankly, as soon as one starts with overclocking, one is driving components beyond their rated capacity. As soon as one does that then all bets are off. Yes, usually it works fine, but one known thing is that components age much faster when pushed.

If one wants stability over performance (and after one gets a bit older and more sedate, one figures out that the incandescent rage that falls every time the machine BSOD's isn't worth a 2% speedup ) one should stick with stock settings.

However, I spotted something when googling that that would suggest the Bad_Pool_Caller thing shows up when you get driver conflicts. I sincerely doubt personally that it is Objectdock that is causing this.

Personally I'd flush the entire computer, format the whole shebang and start from scratch. 17 months worth of crud buildup in Windows alone could be the cause of your problems. One page that mentioned Bad_Pool_Caller specifically mentioned how removing the Audigy card and its drivers followed by reinstalling latest drivers cleaned up a problem.

Now I can obviously not say anything categorically based on just what you say they have done, but if they left "audigy remnants" in the registry and installed the X-Fi drivers that alone could be producing issues (wild-a**ed guessing here, obviously.)

Really, the only sane thing to do at this point is to take a backup of the data you yourself have created, then flushing the whole machine and starting over with Windows and program re-installation. It's painful, but probably the most rational way to get the machine into a crash-free state. There is no way of telling for sure but I'd be more inclined to believe that this is some software snarl in Windows based on the laundry list of things they have already replaced hardware-wise.

But as I said, it really could be a lot of things doing this. It could even be that one memory stick in the machine has gone marginal. The only way to determine that is to boot the machine with Memtest and then do extensive testing of the chips both individually and in concert.

Re: PC Woes: Hardware or Software?

It also couldn't hurt to undo some of the overclocking that was done. Just to be on the safe side. I've always said that paranoia is the first rule of computer maintenance.

Re: PC Woes: Hardware or Software?

Bad_Pool_Caller sounds like a memory allocation assertion failure. I did a bit of searching, and found:

Microsoft Help and Support -- How to interpret a Stop 0xC2 or Stop 0x000000C2 error message on a Windows XP-based computer says


Other sites suggested that drivers for certain boards might cause the error. For instance, one thread said that:



I would say that the chances of this involving a software error (bug), or a driver conflict, are excellent. I would think that if driver code is anything like other interrupt-handling and signal-handling code, making an 'illegal' memory allocation call from a context where this is not safe is something that could go undetected for a very long time. Then, if something changed the runtime environment enough to trigger crashes, the crashes might be intermittent and hard to pin down.

Finally,

Re: PC Woes: Hardware or Software?

Programs like MS-Office, Quicken, etc. should be OK -- but you should regard any program that plays with device drivers and system-level stuff as a possible suspect.


Unless the problem is hardware-based, the trigger for the BSODs is likely to be something you installed near the start of that period. The cause of the BSOD may be the new program -- or may be a bug in an old program that wasn't tickled sufficiently until the new program came along. If this is a software bug, it may be the kind that is intermittent, unpredictable, and hard to debug.



Can the Stardock ObjectDock Plus developers confirm that they aren't using any device driver type hooks into Windows XP -- that their program runs as a normal application? If so, that would seem to clear it.

Are there more likely suspects? I'd think that antivirus programs, CD/DVD authoring or burning packages, drivers for new video/sound/network cards, and the like would be more likely to cause conflicts (or BSODs) than a third party desktop organizer.

Re: PC Woes: Hardware or Software?

(Edited to remove unwanted duplicate post)

Re: PC Woes: Hardware or Software?

Don't know if they ever got your Velocity Micro sorted out but I ran into this.

"Another flaw, which can be executed via Internet Explorer and Firefox Web browsers, can corrupt memory during handling of certain types of requests."

A vague reference, to an issue with VISTA regarding memory allocation.
Since that possiblity was mentioned by others above.

Re: PC Woes: Hardware or Software?

Bad RAM? I had an issue with the same BSOD "Bad Pool Caller" not too long ago. Had to change my ram from Crucial Ballistix to Corsair XMS. Apparently that particular batch of ram modules was bad and caused problems for a lot of people.

Have you used Memtest86 to check your ram for errors? Hardware can fail suddenly, even a little bit in the case of RAM, and you can go nuts trying to locate a software problem!

Re: PC Woes: Hardware or Software?

Or try a System Resore to say a month ago if has been caused by a bad software install or corruption.

Re: PC Woes: Hardware or Software?

A BSOD Bad_Pool_Caller can both be caused by software and hardware. The series of numbers after it pinpoints the what, the where and the when.

Re: PC Woes: Hardware or Software?

Most likely the powersupply is no longer capable of supplying the voltage/current to keep the hard drives running. If the hard drives are truly dead, the PSU could have fried them. If the hard drives are fine in another system, I would still suspect the PSU.

Have them replace the power supply - and hope that the power supply problem didn't cause damage to the rest of the system.

In my experience, power supplies are the most likely to fail - there are a lot of bad ones out there. Second would be bad RAM, and then I would look at the motherboard.