Rob Brobin wrote;
>I have a pc which was getting BSOD's
>I get a BSOD which says "driver IRQL not less or equal" after the drivers
>have loaded. Thats as far as it will go.

"IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL stop errors are caused by software not hardware. To
the best of my knowledge that is. When Windows is in the middle of
scheduling an execution thread, it puts the processor at an Interrupt
Request Level (or IRQL) of 'Dispatch'. This blocks further software
interrupts from the scheduler until the process is complete, and nothing is
allowed to do anything that requires the scheduler. Unfortunately, accessing
a memory address in virtual memory is such an activity, because when a
process generates a VM page fault, it is usually suspended while the slow
hard disk gets around to delivering the requested page. The upshot of this
is that drivers (and everything else but especially drivers) are restricted
to the contents of physical memory while the IRQL is at dispatch. If
anything breaks this rule (say because a corrupted pointer tries to access a
random memory address), XP flings up the blue screen of death."

That may be a little more information than you wanted however that is
basically what is happening.

You said you reformatted the hard drive. After you formatted it you
installed XP. Did this problem occur while you were installing XP? If you
were successful in getting the OS to install, did you install any of the
motherboard specific drivers? Do you have onboard sound and video or do you
have expansion cards?  Are the drivers compatible with XP? Do you have XP
home or Pro? Are you running SP1 or SP2? How much RAM do you have?

"The easy answer is that you have a driver problem somewhere so I would
suggest downloading "new drivers" for the Video which may be the problem
you're having and install them. The next suspect would be the sound drivers.
I would pay a visit to the motherboard manufacturer and download any drives
that pertain to your system and while I was there. Also investigate the
possibility of any known hardware problems too. Sometimes you can find "Bug
fixes" for specific problems. BIOS updates are another facet of system
maintenance. Be careful here though. Unless you have done a BIOS upgrade or
flashed it, don't attempt to do it yourself. Give that task to someone
familiar with the process."

You may want to try this procedure in the future;

1. Format the drive.
2. Install the operating system.
3. Install any motherboard specific drivers like LAN, chipset and the like.
4. Go to Windows update and get all of the current updates needed by the OS.
5. Install any updated and compatible drivers for your sound and video.

Fine tune and set things the way you want them, defrag and clean the drive
and you should be in a better place for happy computing.

Sincerely,

Frank Suszka
netTek Computers
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