Help me before I kill my computer

[Shemeska]

Here's my dilemma. The computer in my lab died on me this afternoon, and it may take with it a week's worth of photoshop mucking with a ton of data I was hoping to use. I've got backups of the raw stuff, so that's not a problem, but all my work on them this week may be fragged.

So I'm using photoshop one minute, then the next minute explorer.exe crashes on me. I reboot and as soon as the desktop pops up I get the same exact error and it crashes once again. I start up in safe mode and ... the same exact error and crash happens. I am not exactly happy about this. *sigh*

The error that popped up was:

instruction at '0x77fcb2bb' referenced memory at '0x0066006d' the memory could not be 'written'

Anyone have any idea of what the problem might be? The only way to resolve this that I can think of might be to grab the hard drive and plug it up as a slave to a working system in the next lab over from me and then snag the stuff I needed. Though it might be more hassle than it's worth if I spend a few long days redoing this all.

 

[reveal]

Here's my dilemma. The computer in my lab died on me this afternoon, and it may take with it a week's worth of photoshop mucking with a ton of data I was hoping to use. I've got backups of the raw stuff, so that's not a problem, but all my work on them this week may be fragged.

So I'm using photoshop one minute, then the next minute explorer.exe crashes on me. I reboot and as soon as the desktop pops up I get the same exact error and it crashes once again. I start up in safe mode and ... the same exact error and crash happens. I am not exactly happy about this. *sigh*

The error that popped up was:

instruction at '0x77fcb2bb' referenced memory at '0x0066006d' the memory could not be 'written'

Anyone have any idea of what the problem might be? The only way to resolve this that I can think of might be to grab the hard drive and plug it up as a slave to a working system in the next lab over from me and then snag the stuff I needed. Though it might be more hassle than it's worth if I spend a few long days redoing this all.

Sounds like a bad memoory chip in the computer. Try swapping out DIMMs from another computer in the lab. If that doesn't work, the quickest fix would be to pull out the hard drive and put it in another as the slave, as you mentioned about.

 

[Psionicist]

http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=sw_winxp&message.id=53588

 

[mojo1701]

This MIGHT belong in the 'Computers, Software and D&D Utilities Forum.'

 

[Darth K'Trava]

Definitely sounds like a bad memory module that needs to be replaced. It's not totally gone or else the comp won't boot at all but gone enough that it can't do it's function as it's supposed to do. See if you can pilfer one out of a similar comp in the lab. But it's gotta be the same type of DIMM for it to work and some DIMMs won't work in certain comps.

 

[Psionicist]

"The memory could not be blank" (where blank is read or written) is the most common memory related error message. It means the program tried to read or write from memory not allocated. Here's some C-code:

int main()
{
	char b[1];
	sprintf(b, "...");
	return 0;
}

I am pretty sure this is a software problem. RAM (the hardware) problems are rarely this uniform and predicitible + thousands of others have this problem without hardware problems.