Tuesday April 01, 2008 NMI: Parity Check
Over the past few weeks, my Dell Inspiron E1705 has started blue screening with the dreaded "NMI: Parity Check" error, which indicates a hardware problem. So far it is only happening after I leave my laptop on for an extended period of time (i.e. 24 hours or more), but after reading accounts on this thread, it seems like the begining of a slow, painful march to the grave for my trusty old Dell.
Well, anyway, before I chuck it, I want to try a few things. The first thing I did was flip the computer over, then take the host attachement on my vacuum and suck the dust out of the fans on the bottom. I was pretty surprised at what came out...cheetoes sized dust bunnies. The vacuum sucked them up to the fan shield, then I had to alternate picking them apart and vacuuming again until they were all gone. Took about 5 minutes, and was definitely easier than opening up the case to manually clean out the fans, though probably not as thorough. But the machine is running a bit cooler and quieter now (I use the I8kfanGUI program for checking system temps).
My next step will be upgrading the cheepo RAM that Dell ships with the computer. I've been wanting to move up to 4GB anyway (currently at 2GB), and RAM failures are a good motivator.
I'll post some followups here to let everyone know how this turns out (...ha..."everyone", like anyone actually reads this blog).
Posted by rickg ( Apr 01 2008, 04:05:47 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]