IRQL Error

[Johnbee58]

I have a dedicated music computer.  It's a Lenovo Core i5 (full description in my signature below) running Windows 8.  Lately, I've been getting blue screen errors that say IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL and it has to restart.  When it does restart it sometimes takes an awful long time to.  It will get up to the Welcome Screen and take several minutes there or it will go from Welcome to a dark blank screen for sometimes are song as 10 minutes or more before Windows finally starts.

I'm seeing this happen in a pattern now where when the Performance meter memory in Cakewalk (bottom line) gets above 15% it will go into a blue screen and do what I described above.  Then, when it reboots and I restart Cakewalk the Performance meter will go down to about 8%, but creep it's way back up gradually and eventually does BS error again. 

I thought it was driver problems with my Scarlett but it happened when I swapped that out for my old Toneport UX2.  My PC tech says it could mean different things.  Back in 2019 I upgraded from 8 gb RAM to 16.  I don't think it did any of this before then.

Any ideas?

?John B

[Xoo]

Memory - use the built-in Windows RAM checker (I forget how to do this offhand) - definitely sounds like failing memory (might just need reseating or similar).