Member Avatar for wrxturbo8

I like to think I'm pretty geeky but I've never run into this. I have a Dell e1405 laptop running XP SP3 that keeps locking up at random times. A few weeks ago I would get this error saying "An NMI was recorded. Please note the following details and report them to your BIOS lead. Devices (Bus:Dev:Func) with SERR set at the time of the NMI:01:1C:01"

I don't know if this NMI error is related to the freezing while in Windows but the timing is suspect. Dell has a diagnostic partition and has different tests it can run. One of which is a symptom tree where you can select the symptom and it runs appropriate diagnostics. For the Freezing symptom all tests it runs get the green check mark except the SATA Confidence Test on the HD which is a grey button. I don't know if that means it was skipped or failed but there is nothing about it in the Results section of the tests so I assume it was skipped. This probably has no bearing on the issue at hand but thought it necessary to share.

When it freezes, nothing works...not even Cntrl-Alt-Del. I have to hard power it off. I've ran memtest86+ and Microsoft's memory diagnotic tools with no issues on either one. I keep the software clean - Avast, Spybot, MalWare Bytes, etc. The freezing is becoming more frequent. The temp coming out the fan seems same as always. I'm assuming my issue is hardware related since I've been getting that NMI error. Any help would be much appreciated.

Edited by wrxturbo8 because: n/a
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Member Avatar for Salem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-maskable_interrupt

> Devices (Bus:Dev:Func) with SERR set at the time of the NMI:01:1C:01"
Depending on your BIOS (it may also be in windows device manager somewhere), you might be able to find out what the bus/device part is at least.

> all tests it runs get the green check mark except the SATA Confidence Test on the HD which is a grey button.
This I find highly suspect (as in pointing the finger at the HD as being the problem).

You might try reading some other similar reports.
http://clusty.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&query=SATA+NMI+errors
NMI's (especially uncaught ones) are not good news (you've made a backup right?)

Edited by Salem because: n/a
Member Avatar for wrxturbo8

I might have found the cause of the issue....time will tell and I will post here if it wasn't fixed just in case this is useful for someone else in the future. After several more hours of research lots of people have had NMI errors and the culprit seems to have been their Atheros wireless card. Some have to downgrade drivers...some upgrade...some replace with a non-Atheros wireless card. Praying this works.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=92036&page=60

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