[hodo2016]

Hello –

Not sure if I am right at this place…

I bought a Dell XPS8700 desktop in late 2014. I started out with Win 8.0 Home. From the very beginning, I had BSOD crashes. I updated to Win 8.1 Home, Win 8.1 Pro and now to Win 10 Pro, hoping that the problem will disappear with a newer OS. However, I still have those crashes (very annoying when working on important documents!). My drivers are up to date and the computer is free of viruses etc.

As far as I have found, this problem might be related to the PCASp60 and/or NIDS6 driver/key. However, there is no PCASp60 driver on my computer (and apparently not needed based on various sources, which I either cannot confirm or not confirm). If I delete one or both keys in the registry, there are still crashes, though. The system error message is always the same:

“The PCASp60 NIDS Protocol Driver services failed to start due to the following error: The system cannot find the file specified.”.

I did some more research and found that these drivers seem to be related to the Realtek PCI onboard LAN unit. But even if I disable the LAN in the BIOS and delete all Realtek drivers in System/MyDevices, the error still exists and my computer crashes.

I am wondering if this is a general problem/unresolvable error of this computer or if it can be resolved..?

I am close to exchanging the motherboard or even switching back to HP computers (which always worked very well for me in the past 15 years).

Thanks in advance for any comments and suggestions!

HD

 

[bassfisher6522]

Question: When you updated your OS....did you check to see if there was a BIOS update. go to Dells driver/support page and input your service tag number and check for a BIOS update. If there is download the BIOS upgrade utility and run that....is will update the BIOS for you. If no update utility then you'll have to do it manually.

 

[hodo2016]

Hello bassfisher6522 -

Thanks for your reply. I already updated to the latest BIOS and the crashes still occur.

HD

 

[JimE]

Does Dell support Win10 on that model?

I would normally suspect a driver issue, but assuming the issue has remained the same with both OS's, it's possibly a hardware fault, and something that should have been investigated when it first started occurring so that it could be been resolved under warranty.

Depending on the BIOS options, you could try disabling the Realtek LAN port in the BIOS. Then the hardware won't be found by Windows and the drivers will be irrelevant. At that point, you may simply need to remove any traces from the registry.

 

[spunk.funk]

Dell does support this model # for Windows 10 64 bit.
Go to Start/Search and type devmgmt.msc, Right click the devmgmt results and Run As Administrator. In the Elevated Device Manager are there any devices with yellow flags? If so, these devices need drivers.
Go to the Dell support/download drivers site for this model Product Support | Dell US
Even if there are no yellow flags, Download the Chipset and the Realtek Network driver for your model. And any other drivers you need from the Device Manager.
If you still get BSOD's then shut down the computer, remove all but one stick of RAM. Download the ISO image for Memtest and burn it to CD using IMGBurn in my signature. Or use the Auto-installer for USB key To Burn to USB Flash drive. Boot off of the newly created Media and run the tests for at least 7 passes on Each Stick of RAM separately. If you get any errors in the lower pane (red) that stick is bad and needs to be replaced.

 

[hodo2016]

spunk.funk –

Thanks a lot for your suggestions. It took me a while to run all the RAM tests. I actually run them twice for many passes as I read about incompatibilities of the XPS 8700 with certain RAM sticks some time ago. No error came up, however. But I found an article about the motherboard and Memory from Crucial and just ordered two 8 GB sticks from them to replace the two 8 GB Patriot stick. The computer came with those two and two 4 GB no-name sticks. Last weekend I also found that there are no BSODs with the two 4 GB sticks alone. The computer works fine now with the 24 GB (16 GB Crucial + 8 GB no-name). I can still find the pCASp60 error in the Event Viewer – but there are no more crashes! I think I can live with this for now and maybe I will find a work-around for this in the future. Your post here was very helpful. Thanks a lot!!

HD

 

[spunk.funk]

You are most welcome!

Some of our community members have reported that deleting the following entry from registry has helped them in getting rid of this message in event viewer.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentContolSet/Services/PCASp50/Enum

Registry disclaimer
Important this section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322756/en-us