Win2k server/blue screen of rebooting death?!?

[gerald]

hi there

I have a computer that is running Windows 2000 Server. It is actually serving no better purpose than a very expensive work station. heh. It turned out that it was not what I was looking for in server software, opting instead for linux/apache/tomcat.

However, I like the way dreamweaver and jbuilder operate on it so I havent turned the CD into a rear-view mirror ornament yet.

But I am very curious about something that happens occasionally. I will be doing something in Dreamweaver, or cutting and pasting some text into a telnet session, and I get a blue screen of death that says that it is paging physical memory to disk, it counts to 100 and then it reboots. ??

I am running on a 1ghz Athlon with 256MB of ram, TNT2 video card, 30GB 7200 UDMA66 hard drive and a single 3com network adapter.

Also of note is that apparently an endless/empty loop in a Java applet running in IE will crash it the same way.

Although I did not choose the OS for my server needs, I was under the impression that it was a fairly stable/secure system. This does not appear to be the case if I can crash it so easily. I can pound and pound my Linux server and it just winks at me. It has not been down for a single minute since it was deployed in October. And yes I do occasionally get on it and fire up Netscape to browse at 45Mbps and the same applet that will crash Windows 2000 will just timeout in Netscape.

Any ideas on how to stop the madness would be greatly appreciated

Regards,
Gerald

 

[ShaithisDanoveur]

Without seeing the drwatson logs for this event it's hard to say what exactly is causing the problem. If there's something you can duplicate I suggest contacting the vendor for that software package and seeing what hotfixes if any are available to remedy that situation.

If you're frequently experiencing errors as physical memory is exhausted however, there's a remote chance that what you're experiencing is related to bad memory. So long as programs are only accessing the lower registers you're fine - but accessing the bad one and poof, BSOD. You can try to confirm this by running the task manager while you run the "problem child application" and see where your memory falls.

Believe it or not, memory that's only partly bad, particularly PC133, is very common. A lot of PC133 is actually PC100 that managed to pass 133 tests (even if barely). Those tests don't abuse it the way users do.

Aside from faulty hardware, it'd be look at the logs and see what they say - they'll tell you a lot about what was going on when the crash happened.