The Bloog

You upgraded to Vista and are all excited about all the new cool features, like: Dreamscene (preview), Sidebar, Flip 3D, Translucent Windows and yes, snappier, quicker loading programs, etc.

What is that, you say? Quicker loading programs? But why? Why? Well… because of SuperFetch.

While SuperFetch will or at least should make your life… easier, it will put a lot more strain on your hardware; more specifically, your system’s memory. As a result, all your enjoyment could come to a (temporary) halt by a dreaded blue screen crash…

So if you’ve gotten some of those crashes lately with Vista, and particularly those that give a MEMORY_MANAGEMENT error message, wait before you decide to change out memory sticks. They may still be good but just a bit overwhelmed by all the new requirements… and need a little more juice to keep them working properly.

To fix the blue screen crash problem, you may try the following: go into the BIOS and see if you can adjust the memory voltage manually. If you can, increase it by 0.05v. Save and reboot and see if the crashes still happen.

If they still do, you may try to increase by another 0.05v, but proceed with care. Increasing voltage will also increase the operating temperature of your memory sticks which can possibly lead to them burning if you don’t monitor their temperature.

Needless to say, playing with the voltage supplied to the different parts of your computer is fairly hardcore for some, so do this at your own risk. Other than that, enjoy…

If you’ve tried to increase voltage by up to 0.1v and the crashes continue, you really may have a memory problem.. or a temperature problem… or a driver problem. Try to cool those sticks off first or ultimately try different sticks; or wait for driver updates. Good luck.

UPDATE 09/30/2007: This memory management blue screen in vista may also be caused by overclocked memory. So check your BIOS settings and make sure your memory is running at its default speed. If it is overclocked, either bump it down a notch and then see if you still get the blue screen, or to isolate the problem quicker, run it at its default speed.

Some motherboards allow you to asynchronously overclock your processor and memory. That means that you may run the cpu at one frequency and the memory at another. In my case, i discovered that while having my cpu overclocked and the memory at its default speed, the memory was still running at the processor’s overclocked speed. I believe that was the cause of the memory management blue screen errors. Running the cpu at its default settings, caused the memory to also run at the default settings, solving the memory management blue screen crashes. For those interested, this issue occurred on a Asus A8N-SLI motherboard.