Blue Screen of Death - BSOD

Since 1 week the Dell D610 Latitude is plagued by sporadic blue screens (BSOD) with various STOP messages, sudden reboots or a frozen screen. The frequency is a few times per week or sometimes 2-3 times per day. It seems there is no relation at all with the activity performed on the D610 laptop. Also this has never been seen before on this laptop. Nothing was changed when the problem started to occur.
 

DELL memory test for BSOD

The Dell Diagnostic CD (ISO file download) from the Dell website for drivers and updates has been run several times during the night. Nothing came out, all seems ok. Also the disk is ok, there is enough diskspace, and the paging file is large enough. (set on automatic size)
 

Changing drivers for BSOD

Next the following drivers where updated:

- Synaptics touchpad driver to version 5.4.104.4
- Intel 2915ABG wireless driver to Intel version 12.1.2.0 (click here to get the intel software)

which somehow caused the frequency of the problem to go down.

The worst is the sporadic and random nature leaving no indication where to look, or to make a distinction if it's a software or a hardware oriented problem. The stop messages are either from random drivers or interrupt based. From a hardware point of view the first suspicion goes to RAM memory. The D610 has 1 Gb extra memory on-board.
 

DELL D610 memory swap

In January 2009, the memory of the DELL Latitude D610 is swapped with the memory of another D610. The problem is now gone (June 2009) never appeared again. On top of that the crash problem moved to the other DELL Latitude D610. This indicated it's a memory problem!

The cause of the failure is the Samsung 512Mb DDRAM of the following type.

This is a Samsung 512 Mb 2Rx16 PC2 DDRAM M470T6554CZ3-CD5