Gaming Vista constantly BSODing

[Gerinych]

Okay, here's the case. When I boot Vista and use it for a while, it gives me a BSOD with STOP: 0x0000008E (it gave me 0x0000007E before). I installed a crashdump analyzer WhoCrashed and it blamed the crash on ntkrnlpa.exe, but it also gave me a different stop message and different time of crash (doesn't matter). Anyway, the program told me what I could do to stop BSODs, one of the solutions were to upgrade my BIOS. I did, but now I can't use the F8 menu when I boot the computer because of a thing I'd like to call "sticky key". What happens if if I want to press a key, I have to hold on down for a while before BIOS recognizes it. This makes it hard for me because BSODs come up much later if I boot the system with last known good configuration. But this is not the time to blame BIOS.
Anyway, the upgrade didn't work and now I'm in Ubuntu. I have the access to my Vista partition and the dump files from WhoCrashed. I can't open them, though, because the damn thing encoded them for reasons unknown. Vista blames it on my Nvidia SATA drivers, but I updated them and still nothing. I begin to think it's a virus of some sort, but AVG can't catch anything except for Megaupload Toolbar spyware and something called "KMiNT" in registry. I checked, that entry was from installing Golden FTP Server.
The first time I got this BSOD was when I was playing GTAIV. I played the game on "no restrictions" mode because with my crappy computer I could only see 4 feet from Niko was standing, everything else was black.

Yeah, that's pretty much it. Any ideas?

 

[UltraMagnus]

well, I was going to just answer with, "its vista, THERE'S your problem!"

have you tried the most obvious solution, nuking vista and reinstalling? I have never had a BIOS upgrade fix a BSOD issue, it seems to be what M$ recommends if they can't think of anything else, simply because they know most people won't try it.

 

[Maz7006]

Hmmm... If you dont have anything important just back all your stuff up from ubuntu and re-install vista. BSOD can be a behatch sometimes. May we also know i bit more about your PC/ or Laptop specs.?

 

[Gerinych]

Reinstalling is kind of a last resort, I have too much stuff there to lose.

Specs:
AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+ 2.00GHz
2.00GB RAM
nVidia GeForce 7600GT 256MB
ASUS M2NPV-VM
300GB SATA drive (Vista) + 80GB SATA drive (Ubuntu)

About the virus thing, I remember AVG detecting LaunchGTAIV.exe having a virus of some sort, most likely a trojan.

 

[Minox]

About the virus thing, I remember AVG detecting LaunchGTAIV.exe having a virus of some sort, most likely a trojan.

NOD32 also did that at first for me, but that proved to be a false alarm since I had just downloaded it from Steam so I put it to exceptions.

 

[nin10do]

i had a LOT of trouble with vista when i first installed it. then i updated the drivers and now i'd say it's the most stable windows platform like ever.

driver magician fixed everything for me.

 

[SirSweeps]

I tend to think that it is a hard drive problem ... could be too many bad sectors ...

 

[Maz7006]

Reinstalling is kind of a last resort, I have too much stuff there to lose.

Specs:
AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+ 2.00GHz
2.00GB RAM
nVidia GeForce 7600GT 256MB
ASUS M2NPV-VM
300GB SATA drive (Vista) + 80GB SATA drive (Ubuntu)

About the virus thing, I remember AVG detecting LaunchGTAIV.exe having a virus of some sort, most likely a trojan.

Yeah i got the same thing for the GTAIV virus thing, BTW you are are pretty optimistic to run GTA IV on those specs. I mean a 7600GT wont be able to handle it, and im guessing you used that thing that makes you go over the limit in which the game llets you. You dont ave a virus problem mate. You have a hardware prob. Im really not sure what you should do, my experience would tell me to have a nice fresh install of Vista, you may wanna consider Windows 7 when it comes out, it will run much more smoothly on those specs.

 

[delta123]

you can install over you old vista installation and what it will do is rename the program files folder and windows folder and the documents folder to windows.old etc. so all you have to do is to copy over the files that you need from the .old folders and then delete them.

 

[Raestloz]

Maybe it's coz you pushed your system too far? I sometimes got BSOD too, but mine says something about memory, I forgot, it was something like wrong memory allocation or access violation or something. It sometimes happened when I have around 10 windows opened

 

[kobykaan]

googling ntkrnlpa.exe some say its a memory issue with faulty ram others say its the graphics card at fault some sites also state that the ntkrnlpa.exe could be corrupt!

so maby try a VISTA RECOVERY link this will keep all your current settings etc and just replace the system files with the original ones

 

[Gerinych]

Ok, sorry for not posting for a while, I've been tied up with Ubuntu.

Progress report:
I ran chkdsk from Vista and it turns out I have some bad sectors there. It also trashed file 25 (?) about 8 times. Then at about 32% it said that it can't go on and that I need to run chkdsk in a read-and-write mode. I tried doing that, but it said that the disk was in use, so I had to schedule chkdsk to run right before booting Vista. For some reason, it didn't come up, so now I'm going to try to repair it with a recovery console.

I'll get back to you when I'm done.

 

[Jiggah]

Why not just run chkdsk in the recovery console? Make sure to use /f /r so "chkdsk /f /r."

 

[Captin]

ntkrnlpa.exe is a well known file for being attacked by virus's.

I always take notice when a virus killer tells me there's something wrong. I know false positives exist but I'm not taking the risk of something being bad or not.

Call me paranoind, but I've never had 1 blue screen in Vista since I got it when it came out.

I have GTAIV installed too. It's a massive install from 2 DL-dvdr's, but runs sweet on this quad core, 8gb ram with an old nvidia 9600GT with 1024Mb ram.

 

[Gerinych]

Why not just run chkdsk in the recovery console? Make sure to use /f /r so "chkdsk /f /r."
Yeah, I ran it, but only with /f, and right now I don't see the difference because it crashed at the login screen when I was away. Normal chkdsk finishes without problems, though.

Captinntkrnlpa.exe is a well known file for being attacked by virus's.

I always take notice when a virus killer tells me there's something wrong. I know false positives exist but I'm not taking the risk of something being bad or not.

Call me paranoind, but I've never had 1 blue screen in Vista since I got it when it came out.

I have GTAIV installed too. It's a massive install from 2 DL-dvdr's, but runs sweet on this quad core, 8gb ram with an old nvidia 9600GT with 1024Mb ram.

I scanned ntkrnlpa.exe with AVG and it found no viruses. I don't trust AVG though.

 

[Issac]

sounds to me that you have some bad RAM...
i take it it's a desktop?

is it the same size of the RAM? I mean, I had two 512 MB RAM things... but one had 32 MB parts, and the other had 64MB parts... so it wrote 64 on 64, 64 on 64, 64 on 64, 64 on 32 OUT OF MEMORY BSOD FFSBBQ!

like that...

so I had to remove one... There are a few RAM boot-cd's you can burn, to test your RAM.... might work...

 

[Gerinych]

sounds to me that you have some bad RAM...
i take it it's a desktop?

is it the same size of the RAM? I mean, I had two 512 MB RAM things... but one had 32 MB parts, and the other had 64MB parts... so it wrote 64 on 64, 64 on 64, 64 on 64, 64 on 32 OUT OF MEMORY BSOD FFSBBQ!

like that...

so I had to remove one... There are a few RAM boot-cd's you can burn, to test your RAM.... might work...

Not sure what you mean, but I had the second stick for some time and nothing bad happened, Both sticks are 1GB DDR2. I ran Ubuntu's memtest86+, it went through some tests for an hour with no problems, but then I cancelled it.

Might not be important, but I got 13 svchost.exe processes, some ran by SYSTEM, some by NETWORK SERVICE, some by LOCAL SERVICE. The biggest one sucks about 66MB RAM.