Irql_not_less_or_equal

[thajeremy]

I get the Blue screen of death from time to time and the error is always on my soundcard...a Terratec EWS88/MT. I have been doing some reading on the problem and I have not found anyone with the exact problem on the same card. I have found where people have had the same error message on different peices of hardware. They have fixed the problem by doing any number of things from just updating drivers, changing the hardware, and changing the IRQ of the hardware. I want to try changing the IRQ of my soundcard. Can someone help me figure out how to do that? I dont think its a soundcard problem because this is my second EWS88/MT and the first one did it as well. This is also the 3rd computer that I have had it in and I still get the same error. Its not often...but often enough to bug me....any help would be greatly appreciated....

 

[Dogman]

You might need to physically uninstall the card, re-boot without it, then shutdown and re-install it. You can try the uninstall under the hardware manager, then scan for new devices, but I would probably just uninstall it, then re-install. Since this has happened in multiple computers, it might not help. Do you have the latest drivers for it? Since you mentioned drivers, I assumed you do. Other than this, you might need to go into BIOS and change the settings.

 

[Jim Y]

When this happens sometimes, but never predictably; and despite it always seeming to be one item that's reported as the cause, I think it is possible for this to be a general fault with the pc.

I've had similar a few times and it too was my soundcard driver (M-audio Delta.sys) in the blue screen info. A look in the BIOS "pc health" screen showed the CPU was getting rather hot. The CPU fan was still running but it was noisier than it used to be so I thought it was maybe running slow due to bearing wear. I worked with the side off the case for a few weeks and never saw the error again. I didn't leave it at that, a chance to buy a faster CPU for the mobo meant I got a new cooler too, so with that, the case was closed with a cooler and faster CPU inside.

Examining the old cooler with the fan taken off the heatsink showed it was completely chocked up with dust! This seems to be a danger with copper/aluminium multi finned coolers which have much closer air spacers between the cooling fins compared to traditional diecast heatsinks.

The above is one possible cause. Bad memory (run memtest86) is another and also a weak PSU. Attempts to overclock CPU, memory and/or PCI bus can also lead to instabilty.

 

[thajeremy]

is there any software that will log what is going on in the PC so that I can look at it after I reboot that might give me some clue as to what is happening?