XP Blue Screen
Posted by hsin on April 16th, 2006
In theory, WinXP is suppose to prevent letting software crash the OS and seeing the dreaded Blue Screen of Death and overall I guess I do see less blue screens then previous versions. However, software drivers can still crash the OS which I found out recently. It took awhile before I tracked it down to a buggy network card driver. WinXP detected my Netgear FA312 ethernet card on installation and even Windows Update didn’t find anything more recent drivers. However, I was starting to see random freezes and crashes to blue screen with the message: DRIVER_IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. It took me awhile before I found someone on the web mentioning that he had the same problem and it was caused by a buggy network driver.
I went to Netgear’s site and downloaded the 1.8 version of the driver and so far things look better. I’m mainly writing this to remind myself that if I ever had to reinstall winxp again to not forget to update the driver.