Need help ASAP with Windows BSOD on a PC

[gauchogolfer]

Hi all,
I dread the thought of venturing over to a Windows forum for help, so please bear with me. I've got an older (P4) Dell tower running XP Home that has a constant BSOD. It started yesterday, and has never been a problem before. The BSOD message is:
DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
STOP: 0x000000D1 (0x00000014,0x00000002,0x00000000x0xF99490F8)
IdeChnDr.sys - Address F99490F8 base at F9946000, DateStamp 3bd89c65

I try rebooting into safe mode (all of the available incarnations) but no dice. I keep getting kicked back to the BSOD. I can get into the BIOS by holding down F2; anything I should try and change to make things better?

I'm obviously well past the support/warranty phase with this Dell, so I'm counting on you guys!

TIA.

 

[edonetampa]

sorry - didn't see the post earlier.

you may have bad ram. this will cause the bsod screen that you have (as well as 100 other things). if you have multiple ram sticks, try taking them out randomly and see if you can start up.

the best way to check for bad ram is running a ram test. I recommend one called memtest. it's free, which is great, just need to burn the iso to a cd and let it start up from there. it runs all of kind of math processes at the ram and waits for a failure. if that's the case, and you don't know what ram you need, go to crucial and put in your computer specs, find out what ram you need, then go get it locally, which will probably be a bit less expensive.

good luck!