I have a Windows XP machine and no matter what I do I when I crank the machine up I get a message that the program has encountered a problem and needs to be shut down. I have recently added memory to the machine but that is the only thing that has changed. The only thing that I have been able to run with success is a defrag. The problems I run into are running Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, and even doing a Virus Scan with Mcafee. They all run for a few minutes and then Microsoft's Send Error Report window comes up and tells me the system has encountered a problem and needs to be shut down. When I choose to get more information it does not tell me much. The event viewer tells me that the application has hung due to a bad fault bucket. Could this be bad memory?
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The first thing I would do would be to test out that new memory. You can easily do that with Memtest86 -- obtainable at http://www.memtest86.com/. "Memtest86 is [a] thorough, stand alone memory test for x86 architecture computers." You can either burn a bootable CD or create a bootable floppy disk with it. You can boot the machine with the Memtest86 disk, which auto-starts the memory test process. This way you bypass Windows altogether so that you can test out this new memory. If Memtest86 doesn't find any problems, then I'd look into creating a Windows XP boot CD with BartPE (http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/) so that you can at least boot up and run some utilities to check things out. The BartPE website documents well how to create the bootable CD.
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Microsoft Send Error Report