Stephen J. Link wrote:
>
> I am having problems with my daughter's machine again. She is
> getting GPFs in her educational programs.  Don't GPFs generally
> mean memory problems?  It has 8 megs.  I am wondering if one of the
> simms might be bad.

  A GPF generally means that some code tried to reach memory it
hadn't arranged access to.  This usually means that a "pointer" value
was found, when used, to be invalid.

  It's true that one possibility is that a valid value was stored in
an unreliable RAM location, and so when it was retrieved for use it
was incomplete or corrupted.
  But a far more likely scenario is that an application obtained this
pointer from somewhere, assumed it was valid (There's no general
test, but there are some standard invalid cases that should be
checked for), and passed it along to some API call that tried to use
it.

  Tracking down the original culprit in this kind of chain is
difficult without a debugging environment and the application source
code.
  However, the #1 suspect as originating code of bad pointers has
been, in my experience, video drivers.  Reinstalling hers (see if
there are newer ones on manufacturer's web site) may fix the problem.

David G