Getting Blue Screen

[Lemonade1324]

So I begin playing a game of Civilization 5 and about half an hour to an hour in the whole computer reboots. When it starts up again it gives me an error message saying I got Blue Screen. The actual blue screen doesn't pop up when it reboots though so I have no idea what's happening.

It's happened three times so far and exactly the same thing happens each time. I downloaded BlueScreenView and it said that all three times is was caused by ntoskrnl.exe

I have no idea what that means though.

 

[ingtar33]

might be dead or dying ram... you'll want to test your system ram one stick at a time with memtest86 to rule that out. otherwise i'm not sure what to tell you except try a fresh install of windows.

 

[Lemonade1324]

Have you ran a memory diagnostic such as memtest86 yet?

A google of ntoskrnl.exe blue screens found a thread about it and a few of the suggestions were to attempt to repair the Windows installation or back all your important stuff up and do a fresh install. The reason is that the file ntoskrnl.exe may be missing or corrupted and a fresh install or repair should restore it.

link to thread http://www.sevenforums.com/bsod-help-support/23643-ntoskrnl-exe-bsod.html

Ok i'm doing the memtest thing now. Going to leave it over night and see what happens then. Thanks!

 

[johnbl]

whocrashed.exe is another program that might help, or you can post your memory dump on the cloud (skydrive) and give public access to it and
someone can take a quick look. ntoskrnl.exe is a core operating system file, if it is listed at the cause, it generally means that some driver, or hardware corrupted memory it was using, ntoskrnl.exe detects the corruption and shuts down the OS via a bluescreen. These errors are harder to figure out because the process that did the corruption was not currently executed process at the time that the OS detected it.

 

[Lemonade1324]

whocrashed.exe is another program that might help, or you can post your memory dump on the cloud (skydrive) and give public access to it and
someone can take a quick look. ntoskrnl.exe is a core operating system file, if it is listed at the cause, it generally means that some driver, or hardware corrupted memory it was using, ntoskrnl.exe detects the corruption and shuts down the OS via a bluescreen. These errors are harder to figure out because the process that did the corruption was not currently executed process at the time that the OS detected it.

I don't think it's the drivers because i'm assuming that this would cause it to crash all the time, not just when in a game. I'm doing the memtest right now and i've got 2 passes. I read somewhere that I should leave it overnight and check it in the morning because you should be looking to get about 10 passes.

But i'm just wondering, could it possibly be down to overheating issues?

 

[johnbl]

whocrashed.exe is another program that might help, or you can post your memory dump on the cloud (skydrive) and give public access to it and
someone can take a quick look. ntoskrnl.exe is a core operating system file, if it is listed at the cause, it generally means that some driver, or hardware corrupted memory it was using, ntoskrnl.exe detects the corruption and shuts down the OS via a bluescreen. These errors are harder to figure out because the process that did the corruption was not currently executed process at the time that the OS detected it.

I don't think it's the drivers because i'm assuming that this would cause it to crash all the time, not just when in a game. I'm doing the memtest right now and i've got 2 passes. I read somewhere that I should leave it overnight and check it in the morning because you should be looking to get about 10 passes.

But i'm just wondering, could it possibly be down to overheating issues?

if you get a bugcheck, the OS knows why it generated the bugcheck and stores the info in the memory dump.
often it takes less than a minute to figure out the problem when you look at the memory dump via the OS kernel debugger. That is why i suggested to put it on skydrive.

drivers often will not crash until software is under heavy use: for example, drivers will share kernel memory blocks, they will use them and free them to back to the OS. Many drivers will continue to use the memory after they have claimed to have released them back to the kernel memory. when the OS detects the modifed block it will generate a bugcheck so the problem can be isolated and fixed.

 

[Lemonade1324]

Turns out it was the drivers for the motherboard. I ran memtest and got no errors and 8 passes so I reinstalled the motherboard drivers and so far it hasn't rebooted at all. Thanks all for the help though!