Weekend Troubleshooting and Errors

[Nano Adam]

For some context, this laptop is my secondary one so there is not much mission critical needs here. The laptop is an HP Pavilion cs-0064st with i7-8550u, 8GB ram, 1TB HDD and 16GB Optane Memory. 

 

I was already getting BSOD's in Windows 10 for a while around Jun of last year, but then they stopped randomly and for about 5 months I had a very smooth experience. Now just about last week, I started getting those BSOD's again. The error codes were I believe: SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION and MEMORY_MANAGEMENT. Upon Googling them, I would find hints toward driver issues. 

 

So this weekend I decide to tackle the issues with a clean install of Windows 10. And things do downfall here. 

1. The Windows 10 Installer gives me an error and says there might be something wrong with my USB.

 

2. I install Windows 11 which successfully installs but I get like 5 BSOD's even one during the setup process. One BSOD was in Edge: `STATUS_STACK_BUFFER_OVERRUN`. Then the rest were just normal OS tasks: `SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION`, `KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED`, `MEMORY_MANAGEMENT` and `KERNEL_SECURITY_CHECK_FAILURE`.

 

3. I try installing Ubuntu 18.04 which gets installed but can't perform package updates and has issues. But based on past experience I try upgrading to 20.04 which fails through. I can't do clean install 20.04 because of Optane RST issues.

 

4. Finally I did Cloudready Chromium OS which just killed browser processes randomly every few minutes. The "Aw Snap!" pages were: `SIGSEGV` and `SIGILL`. 

 

Just to mention, a big reason why I was able to sustain through all these OS installs and errors is because I do programming so jumping back in and fixing and retrying were already part of me, and didn't get me annoyed or anything lol!

 

And I did Google most of the errors and couldn't match up the scenario. 

 

Hopefully the community can help out get this laptop maybe back up and running to a 99% stable point because as a student this laptop was within a budget range which is why I was willing to take it to and from school. But if I can't, not a big issue because all my tasks can still get done!

[maremp]

38 minutes ago, Nano Adam said:

Upon Googling them, I would find hints toward driver issues. 

Are you sure those were from legit sources and not the sites that push you to install their magical "fix drivers" softmalware? If a website suggest to use a random 3rd party program, I am very skeptical at everything they say.

 

I'm not expert, but my intuition says this could be an issue with the RAM. I'm judging that by the various types of memory errors, as well as SIGSEGV (segmentation fault).

 

Do you have any chance of trying a different RAM stick? Or if that 8GB is in 2x 4GB configuration, try unplugging one of those and run with only 4GB to see if you still get an error and then retry with the other one. 
If it's a single stick and you do not have any other option, you could go to a computer repair shop and ask them if they can try it. From my experience, if you're able to self-diagnose and are nice, they might charge you for just the parts (or even free if you end up figuring out that's not the issue), but I might be lucky, so YMMV.

[Nano Adam]

3 minutes ago, maremp said:

Are you sure those were from legit sources and not the sites that push you to install their magical "fix drivers" softmalware? If a website suggest to use a random 3rd party program, I am very skeptical at everything they say.

 

I'm not expert, but my intuition says this could be an issue with the RAM. I'm judging that by the various types of memory errors, as well as SIGSEGV (segmentation fault).

 

Do you have any chance of trying a different RAM stick? Or if that 8GB is in 2x 4GB configuration, try unplugging one of those and run with only 4GB to see if you still get an error and then retry with the other one. 
If it's a single stick and you do not have any other option, you could go to a computer repair shop and ask them if they can try it. From my experience, if you're able to self-diagnose and are nice, they might charge you for just the parts (or even free if you end up figuring out that's not the issue), but I might be lucky, so YMMV.

Thanks for your answer!

 

Those "malware" sites I am well aware of lol. I avoided those for sure, and if I remember correctly was checking a forum post on Microsoft, and toms-hardware. Mostly they pushed towards DriverVerifier but I am not gonna try to run that because it might take hours to diagnose the driver in which I don't have the time simply for that. 

 

The laptop is sadly a single 8gb stick or I first thing for sure would have tried it. 

 

Oh well. I don't really know what to do at this point because I wouldn't trust a repair shop unless it was absolutely necessary and reliable ones go way out of budget. 

 

Thanks anyway! If there is anything else to chime in, feel free to do so!

[maremp]

16 hours ago, Nano Adam said:

Thanks for your answer!

 

Those "malware" sites I am well aware of lol. I avoided those for sure, and if I remember correctly was checking a forum post on Microsoft, and toms-hardware. Mostly they pushed towards DriverVerifier but I am not gonna try to run that because it might take hours to diagnose the driver in which I don't have the time simply for that. 

 

The laptop is sadly a single 8gb stick or I first thing for sure would have tried it. 

 

Oh well. I don't really know what to do at this point because I wouldn't trust a repair shop unless it was absolutely necessary and reliable ones go way out of budget. 

 

Thanks anyway! If there is anything else to chime in, feel free to do so!

I'm not sure what kind of ram it is, but you could look at 2nd hand options if there's anything you can get for cheap. Probably the whole laptop is not worth much, but maybe it's worth the $10-20 to try and bring it alive, but I don't know if you can get ram that cheap and you'd be taking a bet on someone's guess