Ok heres my problem, and I intend to explain it in great detail so you can presume that this problem is a lengthy one. I hope someone has the courage to read through all of it and help me out. I'd rather not have to buy a new computer but instead use this one as a learning experince for the future.

I recently came into possession of a Cicero Athlon XP 2200 with 256MB of memory model for free. Apparently the hard drive was entirely corrupted and completely un-useable. You couldn’t even boot into windows if you tried or reformat anything when attempting to repair, or reinstall windows XP using the windows operating system disc. So this is what I did in the beginning to salvage a machine I had planned to make as my exclusive a media computer used for watching anime episodes on my T.V, using as a stereo system which was hooked up on my surround sound, and using as a direct link for my Xbox 360 media connect.

I went out and I bought a MAXTOR 200 gig hard drive for really cheap and I after removing the original corrupted 70gig hard drive; I installed it (I stored the 70gig hard drive away to be used later for something incase I might need it). I purchased a windows XP SP2 operating disc from my local computer store and inserted it into the DVD-ROM drive and entered the Cicero’s system bios screen to make the DVD-ROM my primary boot drive. The Windows installation screen popped up after loading, detected the newly purchased MAXTOR hard drive, and asked me if I would like to format or partition the drive using the NTSF file system. While I thought it was already formatted I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to let windows do it again, so I did. Only after about 4% into the reformatting I got this blue screen of death IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

Now this makes no sense to me because this is a conflicting driver error message. I had taken every piece of hardware out of it that may be causing the driver error but I kept getting the exact same blue screens. So at first I figured it may have been the Maxtor hard drive and I tried utilizing the software that came with it but to no avail. I kept encountering the exact same problems. On top of that; the DVD-ROM drive appeared to have difficulties loading the OS disc properly at times. This is the unethical thing I did to originally fix the problem only to eventually cause new problems down the road.

I disassembled my home computer from all its additional hardware and installed the newly reformatted MAXTOR drive inside it instead, replacing the hard drive that my computer was running off of originally. I did everything like I did before with the Cicero and began the installation process on my home computer and things went incredibly smooth. Not a single kink or blue screen.

After it had finished, I took the MAXTOR drive that had the XP OS installed in it and reassembled my home computer with the original hard drive and hardware and everything worked again flawless; despite what seemed like a risk I may had been taking.

I reinstalled the MAXTOR hard drive it into my Cicero tower and the operating system loaded up perfectly. However when I attempted to do a windows update a problem came about when I had punched in the windows serial key prior to installing it on my other machines tower; which I did using the information located on the top of the Cicero’s tower. Unfortunately it apparently registered that one computer tower and all its hardware and I had to call Microsoft back in order to switch its usage back to the original Cicero tower that I was using it for. But that was the least of my worries.

Everything went well…. For a while. Later on problems started developing. I bought a cheap 256mb ATI card for my home computer and took out the Raideon 9200 I was using on it originally. I installed a Raideon 9200 graphics card into my Cicero tower and installed the drivers; so that I could plug a component cable it into my T.V home entertainment unit and watch episodes I had downloaded from the internet from my computer on my T.V. After doing this for a few weeks I started getting repeated Blue screens of death IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL.

They would happen spastically. Sometimes they would happen right in the middle of me watching a video from the computer. Sometimes they would happen ten minutes after surfing the internet. I’m not sure if it was always the same ones but what I am sure of was that it would happen completely at random and I couldn’t figure it out why. Soon it got to the point where it wasn’t comfortable using the computer anymore and I wanted to start fresh because I figured the problem was happening because of the way I had strangely installed the OS originally on another system.

What I did was I went out and I bought an external hard drive kit. I disassembled the computer and extracted the MAXTOR hard drive from the Cicero computer tower and installed it into the external hard drive kit to be used as a permanent external hard drive for storing data. Before that I used it to reformat the corrupted 70gig hard drive (using my other computer) I had kept in storage to be reused as the original hard disk for the Cicero computer. After everything was said and done I took the 70 gig hard drive and plugged it back into the Cicero making sure all the wires and cables were securely plugged in. I removed any additional hardware I had installed over the past month; including the ATI card.

I did exactly what I did before hoping the same problem wouldn’t happen twice. I used the purchased windows XP SP2 operating disc, inserted it into the DVD-ROM drive (which this time loaded it effortlessly without any of its original problems I had noticed before) and entered the Cicero’s system bios screen to make the DVD-ROM my primary boot drive. The Windows installation screen popped up after loading, detected the newly reformatted hard drive and asked me if I would like to format or partition the drive using the NTSF file system. While I thought I did that already I figured it wouldn’t hurt to let windows do it again, so I did. Only after about 4% into the reformatting (exactly like before) I got this blue screen of death IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

Can someone please tell me what is going on? Right now I’m suspecting it may be either my memory, my DVD-ROM drive, or that the computers CPU is fried and is entirely worthless.

bad board, bad Ram Bad chip.
Download UBCD and Run Test

it is either the CPU overheating or bad RAM. go out and pick up a CPU heatsink with a good fan directly on it and see if that solves your problem. if not, try and find some known-good ram that is compatible with your system, and see if it goes away.

Bad everything eh? I’m just curious as to how hardware like that even gets to be like… you know… bad? Overuse? Someone tinkering inside of the unit and jolting static electricity everywhere? In that case it may have been me, but I dont think my fragile ego could handle it if that were true.

Where can I find a UBCD testing program and do I require an operating system to run it? As of right now the only function that computer has is going into the BIOS.

I’ll give it a shot. What are practical costs for that hardware nowadays? I don’t even think they manufacture 256mb chipsets anymore, but I could be wrong. And I know how much regular computer fans are but not really sure what constitues a reasonably priced heat sink fan for my CPU.

it's definitely RAM, have experienced this problem before? if no, then just insert ram module into another slot, and clean it up from dust.

I did just that. Things seemed to run smoother, and longer. In fact I even got to an installation progress screen; however the blue screen of death reared its ugly head again with the same error message.

Should I buy a new RAM chipset? Also the computers pretty clean of dust for the record.

Actually i don't think that the problem is in the ram module. but to prove my assumption it's worth to try another RAM stick. the problem is in the RAM slot.

I went out to a local computer retailer and bought a used RAM 256 chip and attempted the reinstallation progress with the same results. This time the error message said ATTEMPTED_WRITE_TO_READ_ONLY_MEMORY

I attempted it a second time, this time using the other RAM slot with the newly purchased memory and I got an error message that stated “A thread tried to release a resource it did not own.”

I attempted it a third time using both 256 RAM chips filling both slots and got the same error message as when I was using the original chip solely; IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. So at the very least this is telling me that the original chip set is crap. Right?

I did two final attempts. I put in the new RAM stick again to see if I’d get the same error messages as before when I first tried, only to get the same IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. I tried one more time in the other slot and the error message this time was DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, so I have no idea where the other first two error messages came from.

These would all randomly occur either during the windows installation process, the reformatting process, or before either of any processes could begin.

So I’m pretty confused. If it’s not my RAM which it obviously isn’t; is it my Mother board slots? And is it worth repairing?

As for the heat sink fan being a potential factor by not cooling the CPU properly, the computer is open cased and there is allot of ventilation and I feel lots of cool air coming from it; so I doubt that’s the problem.

if not the CPU it is something to do with the RAM. have you tried the questionable RAM stick in another computer?

No but I'll give it a whirl and report my results in a few minutes