Every so often, my Vista 64-bit operating system blue-screens within about three minutes of booting up. The blue-screen indicates BAD_POOL_CALLER. Searching on the Internet indicates that this points to a bad driver or bad RAM. I have used to verify that I have the latest drivers for all of my hardware. I have used memtest86 to verify that my RAM is good. I am not overclocking my computer. Provided my computer survives the first five minutes after boot, it can run indefinitely without problem. It does not crash playing 3D games, running VMWare, running "burn-in" software.

The blue-screen does not happen often enough, perhaps one time in four, for me to simply try uninstalling various drivers to see what breaks. Having Windows "check for solutions" results in no additional information. What other steps can I take?

Update: May be useful to check out this related question.

3 Answers

You may have bad or vista-incompatible hardware. What kind of peripherals/additional cards are connected to the computer. I would suggest disconnecting any additional hardware you may have connected and see if the problem continues. If not, one by one, add each piece of hardware back and see if you can determine what is causing the crash.

4

Try running the Driver Verifier to let Windows check if it can find any faulty drivers.

Run: verifier

2

I have not yet performed these steps, but apparently you can examine the debug memory dump to help narrow down the problem. The steps are listed here. I will update this answer with additional information as it becomes available.

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