I recently bought a new Sony Vaio laptop with Vista. I am in the process of replacing the hard drive and since I don't like Vista I decided to install XP Pro on the new hard drive. During the installation I am getting the BSOD with the following error message: page_fault_in_non_paged_area I have researched this issue on google and most threads indicate this is a ram issue. I downloaded memtest86 and ran it overnight and all test passed. I have also seen threads that indicate that this could be a driver issue. Since my hard drive is currently blank other than the windows installation files, could this still be a driver issue? I have heard conversation that pcs built for Vista can have driver issues when downgraded to XP. Any ideas? Thanks for any help....

Generally that error is RAM related. You need to research the STOP code error to help narrow it down. But before going any further, did you look into the driver issue before you dove into this "downgrade"? The problem is, there may not be any XP drivers for your new hardware. The audio & network are the two that normally are the problem devices. See if you can locate all the XP drivers (chipset, video, audio, network, etc) before continuing with the installation.

The stop code is 0x00000050. From my research this code points to faulty RAM, but as I mentioned I did a complete memory test and all tests passed. This is where I am stuck.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/lib... http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=... http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=... Grrrr "...pentathol makes you sing like a canary" ... got brain freeze

Try another memory diagnostic program just to be sure. http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag... http://www.memtest.org/