Critical process died, blue screen of death

[BadAtTechnology]

I have an HP pavilion, touch-screen laptop, running windows 8. I kept getting "critical process died" and "kernel data inpage error", so I completed a factory restore. Now, after the restore, I'm still getting "Critical process died" blue screen of death. It's driving me mad, is it the hard drive? And how do I fix this?

 

[johnbl]

-the kernel inpage error means that something could not be read from storage. It can be a error on the drive or a driver attempting to read a bad address (corruption of data in memory). (it can even be a drive that got jarred loose from its connector.)

critical process died, generally is generally caused when a critical component of windows detects that is data has been modified when it should not have been. It assumes that something bad modified the data and shuts down.
It could be errors reading a the driver from the hard drive, or a error in memory, or another driver is writing to memory that does not belong to it.

Generally, you want to do this:
boot into windows 8, start cmd.exe as an admin, then run the system file checker command:
sfc.exe /scannow
this will look at your core windows files and check for corruption, it will repair the files if it can (from a local backup copy)

if it finds files that it can not repair, that means both copies have been modified. You then need to run the command:
dism.exe /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth
this command will get a good copy from the Microsoft update server. It will also remove certain license validation (prirate) hacks.

Now you just need to figure out why the copy was modified.
I would run a malwarebytes scan.

if you don't figure out the cause, the next step would be to check the hardware: update the BIOS or reset it to defaults and run memtest86.exe on its own boot image and confirm the basic hardware is working.

if you still don't find a cause, it is most likely another driver writing outside of its own memory area corrupting the memory next to its memory. for these cases it is best to go to your laptop vendor and download any driver updates, reboot see if you still get the bugcheck. If you do, you should copy it to a server and post a link to the file so it can be looked at with a windows debugger.