what does this error message mean?

[steadmanSF]

I have a W2000 laptop user who is occasionally getting the following message at start up:

"Stop 0x000000B8 (0X00000000, 0X00000000, 0X00000000, 0X00000000) A wait operation, attach process or yield was attempted from a DPC routine."

The machine gets stuck on this message and the user has to manually power down and restart. Today for the first time it happened while he was typing a document.

Any ideas on this? Thanks.

[ktkendall]

Could be bad RAM

[macko72]

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=318988 try consult this site!!!

[ktkendall]

Bad memory will show up as all kind of weird error messages and will point you down all kind of rabbit trails, because it depends upon what the PC was trying to do when it hit the bad section of memory, and it will never show up with an obvious message that says bad memory sector found at 0x000000B8 0X00000000, 0X00000000, 0X00000000, 0X00000000, so anyways the first thing to do so you don't spend days tracking down rabbit trails is to download a memory tester program and run it to thoroughly test your ram chips..

http://www.memtest.org/

http://www.memtest86.com/

Here are a couple of free ones, they work via boot floppy and do a real good job of extensively testing your memory...