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  THE TROUBLE WITH WINDOWS 95/98

'Details' in the Windows error message box:
      What Does It All Mean?

  IconIf you click the 'details' button on the Windows error message box, you will see something like this example:

  EXPLORER.EXE has caused an invalid page fault in module KERNEL32.DLL at 015f:04500018

Registers:

EAX=0000040b CS=0177 EIP=807bd000 EFLGS=00010293
EBX=00000000 SS=017f ESP=233ef771 EBP=233ef7b4
ECX=7be10980 DS=017f ESI=01026f80 FS=38a7
EDX=7bcd9cd8 ES=017f EDI=00fda2d0

Bytes in CS:EIP:

c9 74 13 8b 40 08 5f 89 46 08 8b 49 0c 89 4e 0c

Stack dump:

017bca63 60000000 6401010d 0001010d 03000000
90000000 08233ef7 20000000 e07be100 4001010a
007be100 0c010100 f7233ef9 e07bcff0 401010a
0001010a
  

  Don't worry if you don't understand anything of this purely technical information, but there is one important bit here that can give you an indication of what is going wrong: the 'address' of the crash. The address is the location in your computer memory where the crash occurred, in this example 015f:04500018. If this address keeps returning, there may well be something wrong with the RAM.
   To test the memory, you could insert a command line in your Config.sys file, located on your primary drive (usually C:\). Simply open this file in Notepad and insert:

device=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS /TESTMEM:ON

The next time you boot, you could get a message that HIMEM has detected unreliable memory at a certain address, and this address could be the same as the one in your error messages. Maybe this detection will not happen immediately, it could take a few days, or it may never happen, in spite of an actual memory fault. If you really want to make sure you would have to run an extensive memory test, which you can do, for instance, with programs like CheckIt or Norton Diagnostics (included with Norton Utilities).

   Unreliable memory can only be fixed by replacing memory modules, which is not very hard to do (read about it in the manual of your computer).

For what it's worth, we can tell you the following about the rest of the 'details':

   - Registers: values of the register of the processor at the moment of the crash.
   - Bytes in CS:EIP: value of the current instruction (in this case c9 74).
   - Stack dump: the route that caused the program to crash.

Technical support services will be interested in this data, so write them down if you get repeated error messages that look more or less identical. There are programs available that keep a log of all the crashes and there details, through which you can more easily try and gather up any possible threads.

First and Formost: General Precautions | Reinstalling Windows without Losing your Data
What if Windows Will No Longer Start? | 'Invalid page fault in module kernel32.dll' | Tools&Links&Books
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