Dellami Posted October 5, 2008 Report Share Posted October 5, 2008 Hi,Hope someone can help me with this curious problem when using utorrent, although I'm not sure if it's a software issue or hardware.I have recently got a Dell Precision 650 workstation (dual Xeon 2.0 gig processors) and when I'm online, and only when downloading using utorrent, when my speed gets somewhere above 250kB/s, the PC blue screens with a NDIS.sys fault, which apparently refers to the onboard network. It may run for an hour before this happens, but happen it always does, so reliable, unattended overnight downloading is out, unless I limit the speed, and even then there are occasional blue screens.My older Dell Precision 410, also a dual processor workstation (though P3s) used the same operating system (Windows XP Pro SP2) and softwares, modem and utorrent and that never happened, but unfortunately its power supply is on the way out or I'd continue to use it for file share. It could potentially max out, if the seeds were there, at my max broadband DL speed of 650kB/s.The newer Dell Precision 650 never blue screens with any other program, and if I'm downloading non torrents it seems reliable at higher speeds. Does this suggest a problem with utorrent? Perhaps the wider number of connections torrents have, from all the peers, is somehow tripping the onboard network, whereas a 121 download is okay?I've tried deactivating and reactivating the onboard network in the Bios. I also got some new RAM after finding 2 tiny square 'resistors' snapped off the top edge of one of the sticks I had. The PC does sometimes produce a pop up window saying it is adjusting the Virtual Memory Page Size, although this doesn't seem to coincide with blue screens. I have adjusted that to a larger size and also tried letting Windows handle it automatically. There is enough room on the hard drives for these page files (which write to disc, to give the RAM some help). None of these things have solved the problem.The BT USB modem I use is not certified by Microsoft, but it has always stated that upon installation on the Dell 410 and it ran without issue with XP Pro. And it works fine on everything (except torrents) with this Dell 650 at all speeds. I have updated the driver. But is it the modem? But if it is why would it work reliably with one XP Pro installation, and not another.I have wondered if there may be a fault on the mobo. Even though the onboard network is switched off, and the data is coming in via USB, is is possible for the motherboard to somehow intercept this as network connection traffic and it's trying to engage the onboard network over the modem, causing a crash?This is typical of a blue screen message:DRIVER_IRQ_LESS_THAN_EQUALStop 0x000000D1, 0x00000006, 0x00000002, 0x00000000, 0xF83B9494NDIS.sys Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GTHK Posted October 6, 2008 Report Share Posted October 6, 2008 The USB modem driver is probably causing the crash (USB based networking tends to suck). Can you try NOT using USB to connect? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dellami Posted October 9, 2008 Author Report Share Posted October 9, 2008 Thanks for your reply, appreciate it.I don't think there's a way for me to bypass the USB connection with this modem, such as connecting it to the onboard network socket, as the modem is also powered by the USB (i.e. there's no separate power supply on this model, and the only other thing on it is a 4-pin UK telephony socket). The USB modem worked with an older Dell workstation using exactly the same OS and other software, and it seems to work on this Dell 650 with everything except high speed torrents. I will get a PCI modem to see if that solves the issue. But before that I'm going to try a reinstall of Windows as I'm starting to wonder if the original damaged RAM it came with (one stick had broken 'resistors' along the top edge) has affected the OS.I found the following page at Microsoft about the Virtual Memory Manager becoming damaged due to faulty RAM, and to delete it and renew with a couple of reboots when other RAM is used. I tried that and the PC was stable for several hours, downloading at high speed. I thought I'd fixed it, but have since had other, different types of blue screen, including Bad_Pool_Caller and general page stop errors (no more NDIS.sys reports though), and all these seem to refer to invalid (mismatched) memory addresses on the hard drive.http://support.microsoft.com/kb/810093 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Switeck Posted October 9, 2008 Report Share Posted October 9, 2008 An external ADSL modem with an ethernet connector is almost certainly a better choice than even the internal PCI modem -- easier to upgrade later. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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