The memory could not be "written."

A couple of days ago, a strange error showed up. The first symptom was a sound: when I turned off the computer, it made a very weird, unusual noise—a sound I had never heard before and one that the computer shouldn't make under normal conditions. It was a clear sign that something was wrong.

Having only that as a diagnostic, while the computer was still running at full capacity, raised even more questions about the noise. What was causing it? A loose cable? It was strange because it only happened once Windows shut down.

Until one of those times Windows shut down—we are talking about Windows XP with SP3—it gave me another clue. The enemy revealed its face, and a error pop-up briefly flashed on the screen. The hated message stayed up for a very short time, but I managed to read part of it, which said ERROR: “(...) referenced memory at (...) The memory could not be "written"”. The message contained a number that I couldn't write down in time. It was a memory address.

This scared me; my first thought was that one of the memory sticks had failed. Since I have more than one, it was a headache because they are expensive, and I would have to remove them and test them one by one. But that wasn't the issue.

I searched the internet, and the problem came up. It turns out to be an error that has been appearing since older versions of Windows. The important thing was that it wasn't a physical RAM error, so there was no problem with the memory slots.

There are countless posts on tech forums—well, many are computer forums, but not specialized ones, haha. And many of the answers received are wrong; while making clear the goodwill of their authors, many of those solutions don't fix the problem or address it from the wrong angle.

The best response I read for these cases was:

“As far as I know, these 'descriptive' errors happen when a program tries to send an instruction to a wrong address. They are usually caused in most cases by an incompatibility between applications, or a poorly registered driver or library.”

Which is complemented by this other one:

“Those errors happen when a program tries to 'occupy' a sector of the OS memory, and since it is an 'unrecognized' process, access is denied.”

Indeed, I started uninstalling the last programs I had installed. It turns out I was installing software, and after one of these—one of the last four I installed—the error appeared. So I rolled back and uninstalled them step by step. There were two that, one way or another, tampered with "Explorer": one was a browser that used the Internet Explorer engine, and the other was a reader that integrated a toolbar into browsers and Windows Explorer. Once uninstalled, the problem disappeared.

The solution for cases like the one I described is to gradually uninstall the most recently installed programs. I should clarify that I don't know if it's the same when the error pops up while running Windows; in those cases, it's possible that the solution, if there is one, might be different.

(originally published on 8/9/2008)