A New BSOD on Every Boot! Where to Begin?

Hi,

I suspect this is a hardware problem, but I could be wrong and I'm not sure what steps to take.

My teenage son's Dell desktop.
Windows XP pro (sp3)
Pentium 4 3GHz
1.5G/ram.

He's fairly good about house-cleaning on his computers, but he's 15 so, you know. He only gets me involved when there's a serious problem.

Two days ago, it went BSOD and wouldn't reboot to anything but BSOD. That's when he got me involved.

I can get it to boot into Safe Mode and Safe Mode w/ Networking, but "Last Known Good Configuration" goes BSOD.

Last night, it wouldn't recognize the keyboard. Today, it can. I haven't done anything else with it yet today.

When I tried to run IOBit Driver Booster or any scans, it would BSOD. The scan would start, but lock up or go blue before finishing.
I got online to Windows Update, but it BSOD'd again before I could do anything.
System Restore would go blue, too. The progress bar would get about 75% done, then BSOD.

I got quite a variety of error messages. Here are most of them:

Three of these: 0x8E (KERNEL_MODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED)--The first parameter is 0xC0000005, a memory access violation.

Two of: 0x50 (PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA)

Two of: 0x0A (IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL)

Also appearing:
0x7A (KERNEL_DATA_PAGE_ERROR),
0X1A (MEMORY_MANAGEMENT)--First parameter 0x00000781, "The PTEs mapping the argument system cache view have been corrupted." (That terminology is way over my head.)
0x4E (PFN_LIST_CORRUPT)
0X24 (NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM)

...and that's when I quit for the night.

Last night, the keyboard would work to hit F8 and get to safe mode, but once in Windows, it wasn't there. Just a blank space in the hardware list.
Today, the keyboard works (used Notepad to test it) and is back on the hardware list.
I was thinking it was an IRQ conflict. My son attached a camera and microphone to it a few days ago, that's why I thought of it, but he said they worked fine for a day or two.

No new programs have been installed in the last month.

All I've really done today is boot it up in Safe Mode w networking and test the keyboard. Since the keyboard now works, I'm going to try to check the drivers and run some scans again if it will let me.

Does the variety of system errors posted above point to a specific problem? Failing memory, maybe? I don't know where to start.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

Variety of errors points to a RAM problem.
Test the RAM http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/memtest86_ffaa.html
run at least 7 passes. As soon as you get an error, you can stop. Replace the faulty stick(s).

 

0X24 (NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM) = the hard drive might have problems, diags here: http://carrona.org/hddiag.html