Stress Tester troubleshooting

[Xander / Prompt Care]

I've got a guy bring back a system with the "ever since you fixed it" complaint.  Found his main problem was his Norton had gone bad and was BSODing with a Memory_Management error.  As soon as I disabled each of its bits in Autoruns, it booted up fine.  I threw in the general Windows repairs in D7.

For good measure, I've scanned the memory.  12 hours, no problems.

Lastly, I set up the stress tester to run 100x with 2minute pauses and a stress test in between.  When I went to bed last night as it started that.  However, in the morning...blank screen.  Monitor light had ambered out like it was sleeping but it wouldn't wake.  Forced reboot.  Came back up on #31.  Ran for about 10 more and, while my back was turned, it did it again.

So, is there any way to track down where in the process it's locking up?

[Foolish Tech]

100x wow!  Sounds like you were using Reboot Master, correct?  Well, wondering if it could be failing in between, have you run the Stress Utility just above it in D7 by itself?  Have you ran reboot master by itself without the stress in between options set?

Stress Utility (which is what reboot master uses in stressing between reboots) is a memory fill and release process simultaneous with CPU stress testing covering multi-threaded CPUs and multi-cores.  Perhaps a neat feature would be to separate or make optional both of these processes so you can run one at a time and single out CPU/Memory.  

[Cybercrypt]

In situations like this I live in the event logs... look for clues in the event logs (Event Viewer under administrative tools in the CP)
you may still have an issue with the system..
Reseat the RAM, seat the ram in different sockets (if the MB has extras that is) if there are two or more sticks remove all but one one.. is the machine getting hot?
with the symptom you describe .. I have seen Video card issues cause problem as well as a HDD issue corrupting the Pagefile.. check the event viewer.. it can be cryptic but it is your best chance..

[Simon]

Have you used any external RAM testing tools such as MemTest86+ or the Windows Memory Diagnostic?

[Xander / Prompt Care]

Yeah, I did it a lot of times as the guy was implying that I'd missed something in the virus removal.  I knew it was clean but didn't know for a fact that everything about Windows itself was ship-shape.  So, yes, it was doing the RebootMaster but running the StressTester by itself for an hour did nothing.

I did reseat the RAM (very first thing I did given what he'd described as symptoms) and did the standard swaps until I determined the BSOD was due to software (Norton).

"Have you used any external RAM testing tools such as MemTest86+"

   "For good measure, I've scanned the memory.  12 hours, no problems."   YES w/MemTest.