Notebook Memory Parity Error (Dell Latitude D820)

January 10th, 2010 Category: General

Recently my several years old Dell Latitude D820 began to freeze several times, around 1 time a day. It happened never all the years before. The last half year I’ve upgraded to Windows 7 Ultimate and purchased new 4GB RAM, but the freezes started a few weeks ago. This is why I think the problem is not related with Windows 7. For checking the hardware I’ve used the Dell diagnostic tool without detecting and problems.

One time a blue screen was displayed with a memory parity error. So I’ve tried to remove first one RAM and after still having freezes the other one. Still with the problem.

After reading many posts which said this may not only be a problem of the RAM, it may be also a problem of:

motherboard
graphics card
WLAN (WiFi) card
…

Removing the WLAN card isn’t difficult, so I did. Furthermore I’ve disabled everything with WLAN and Bluetooth in the BIOS. Afterwards the notebook was running without problems for a few days.

Today I’ve put the WLAN card back into the Notebook (BIOS settings still disabled) and after a few hours a freeze happened again with crazy graphics output.

It seems that the WLAN card causes this problem in my case. It’s not 100 percent proofed but I’ll do further checks and reports.

Update 28th January 2010

Since the last crash after a few hours putting the WLAN card back in the Notebook it runs stable now. WLAN and Bluetooth is still disabled in the BIOS. It really looks that WLAN or Bluetooth causes the problem in my case.

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