This guide will help you investigate the Page Fault In Nonpaged Area Windows Error. The instructions provided work on Windows 10, as well Windows 7 and 8.
The most common reason for this BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) is a problem with your RAM or hard-drive. Memory failures can cause your machine to experience such crashes and the blue screen report would usually contain the message PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA. This generally indicates that there is an issue with your machine’s memory card. Below is a guide with some possible steps that could get this issue solved.
Page Fault In Nonpaged Area
The Guide
It might be difficult to determine what is the exact cause of the problem. If those crashes are way too frequent, you might not have enough time to run the necessary tests in order to find the core of the problem. Therefore, we advise you to enter Safe Mode, which should provide your system with better stability, so that you can continue without being interrupted by any sudden blue screen crashes. Here is how you can boot your computer in Safe Mode.
Testing
There are a whole lot of potential causes to a BSOD crash, so it’s a good idea if you still run a few tests in order to be certain what the precise cause of the system failure is. To determine where the issue lays, we advise you to test your RAM, hard-drive and internal PC temperature.
To test your RAM, you’ll need to use a software tool developed for that purpose. There are a lot of free programs out there that will enable you to see if there is anything wrong with your RAM. One such tool that you can download online for free is memtest86. Keep in mind that this tool requires of you to create a bootable CD/USB with it in order to use it. You can learn how to create a bootable device from this article – it is focused on creating a bootable DVD/USB for operational system, but the method for memtest86 is the same.
The next thing we advise you to do is to test your hard-drive. Luckily, Windows has an integrated function that allows you to do that without the use of third-party software. Of course, you can always download some other tool that may potentially have a greater variety of options, but if you do not want to get additional software, here is how you can test your drives for any bad sectors.
- Open My Computer and right-click on the hard drive that you want to test.
- Select Properties and go to the Tools section.
- Click on Check now.
- Tick both options in the resulting window and select Start.
- You might get a message that your PC cannot test your drives when they are in use. In that case, you can schedule a disk check the next time your PC boots – do that and restart your machine manually.
- If any bad sectors are found, Windows will attempt to fix them.
- It might be a good idea to check your PC’s temperature. Here, you’d once again need to get an online tool to do the job. There are a lot of them that can be downloaded for free online. Antoher example is Open Hardware Monitor. This can give you a lot of useful information about your PC’s condition apart from its temperature, that can help you determine what’s causing the BSOD crashes.
Fixing
If the issue really was memory-related it might be worth opening your PC case and taking a look at your RAM sticks and hard disk. See if everything is firmly in its place and if there are any loose and slack cables or ones that are out of their sockets. If there is a bad RAM stick, you will need to have it changed. Surely, you’d have to buy a new one, however, RAM is pretty cheap and fixing this won’t cost you very much.
If during the tests you’ve found out the fault is in your hard drive, again, you’ll have to get a new one and replace the faulty disk. However, if that is the case, we advise you to first try to back-up any important files and documents that you might have stored on your PC or else they’d be lost. Therefore, if you think you have enough time between the system crashes, do back-up your personal data in order to preserve it.
In case the issue was not coming from your memory, or if you want to try other methods before replacing anything and see if they help, you can head to this article. There, you can find a couple of fixing methods that are focused on resolving software problems that may be the cause behind BSOD.