Driver IRQL not less or equal? What does that mean?

[SteelDraco]

I've been having some computer issues lately, and was wondering if anybody here can think of any possible solutions to it.

The problem occurs primarily when I'm playing World of Warcraft, but occasionally when I'm doing other load-intensive things. I'm running Windows XP, and it will crash to a Blue Screen, with the following message: DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, and then some other hexadecimal stuff. Unfortunately, the error message doesn't stick around long enough to get those numbers, or any additional diagnostic information out of it (the system immediately reboots, and won't stop when I hit the Pause/Break key).

My initial thought was a driver conflict, so I did a clean install of XP and downloaded all the current drivers for everything - really, just my graphics card and motherboard chipset. That didn't help - same problem still occurs.

I checked for a heat issue, and it is running a little hot - about 120-130 degrees processor temp. That's with a box fan blowing into an open case, mind, so there's not much else I can do there short of setting up a water cooling system or something along those lines. And, honestly, the computer's not worth putting together a fancy water cooling system.

I ran several suites of hardware diagnostic software, though only freeware and trialware, and without searching exhaustively for a recommended product. Therefore, I don't know how much I should trust the results. However, according to that, it's not a component issue - everything checked out all right there.

I'm currently starting to wonder if I've got a component going bad. I've had a few thoughts, though, and wanted to run them by people to see what they think.

• I might need a new power supply - the one I'm using is fairly old, and isn't putting out that much power. Only 350W just isn't that much, and power supplies are often to blame for stability problems, in my experience. Built this a couple of years ago, though, and didn't really think of that at the time. This is my best bet as to the cause now.
• I might need to reseat my processor on the motherboard, with new coolant gel between the processor and the board. That would probably help some of the heat issues, if that's indeed the root cause. I'm very surprised at the high temps I'm getting - is this a common problem with the Athlon XP 2000s?
• And, of course, I might have some components going bad. If I don't have replacement parts to switch out to test what might be going wrong, is there any way I can isolate what might need replacing? That's not a problem I've dealt with on my own before, so I'm not sure how to go about it.

The computer specs are...

• Gigabyte GA7N400L motherboard
• Athlon XP 2000 processor (1.67 GHz)
• GeForce FX 5200 video card
• 1 512 MB DDRAM chip
• 350W power supply
• 30 GB Western Digital HD
• 8 GB hard drive I took out of an old XBox

I know it's old, but I don't really play anything other than WoW any more, so as long as I can play that, it's not a significant issue for me. And, when I'm not having crash problems, that runs just fine.

 

[trancejeremy]

Don't quote me on this, but I think that might just be the standard semi-generic crash message in Windows XP for when there is a problem with a device that uses that driver (I think it specifies which driver).

Does your video card have a fan? I used to have a 5200 and it was fanless, and I would sometimes have problems with it overheating. I think this is the time of year when it can get hotter than normal inside, because it's generally cool enough you don't run the AC, but not cold enough for it to be actually chilly inside.

 

[SteelDraco]

Yeah, the video card has an onboard fan, and I have an external box fan sitting next to the open case, blowing air onto it. So I don't think it's a video card heat issue. No temperature sensor on there that I'm aware of, so I don't have any way to check into that, though.

 

[Michael Morris]

I had a bad DVD drive create that error. Poke around the MSDN with that error message to get some more ideas on it.

 

[SteelDraco]

My DVD drive isn't being used when the error occurs, so I'd be somewhat surprised if that was it. It doesn't occur when I'm doing other stuff on my computer - just when I'm doing load and graphics-intensive stuff. And I can use the DVD drive just fine, without any kind of errors.

 

[Redrobes]

Its definitely a driver issue... having said that it could be that your system is overheating and causing an exceptional situation and excercising some area of the drivers that are not normally used - or tested.

The first place to start is by opening the event log and looking at the system events and seeing the dirty big warning mark next to an entry which will list what happened in which software component before it rebooted.

That should tell you the driver. It could be a NIC issue playing online or even a system driver issue but I bet its the video driver. Anyway something has caused an hardware interrupt which was badly handled. The interrupt could be caused from normal operation in which case the software driver is at fault but its also probable that an unexpected interrupt was generated because some hardware bit was too hot or otherwise not working to spec. Likely culprits here are the chip set since this does a lot of the interrupts in the core system - esp DMA which is used by both NICs and video cards.

So... Is your chip set (Northbridge) temperature ok ? Does it have a heatsink on it ?

If you think everything is cool enough and your CPU and RAM sticks are well seated, cables plugged in firm etc then look to the event log for inspiration.

This is a really difficult one to pin down a solution for. It could be many things but you can narrow it a bit if you know what to do. Im afraid you need to put your hacker hat on...

 

[Rl'Halsinor]

Tons of people have gotten this message. I know I have and I've narrowed it down to 3 possibilities.

1. My Logitech MX 310 mouse. There is a known kernel conflict with the Windows XP 32 bit system. However, I did download the latest driver. Still I get an occasional system crash and then the inevitable message and physical dump.

2. It could be my Sunbelt Kerio firewall.

3. It could strongly be my M-Audio 5.1 Revolution sound card. It seems that since Creative owns Sensura they will not allow third party sound card manufacture's to access their algorithms. The drivers of this card do not play nice with nVidia chipsets and since Creative won't release the needed algorithms I'm screwed. So, what sound card do you have?