Ishida Tech Solutions, Ltd.
The personal and professional home of Brad Ishida

Recently while upgrading the hardware on a very old Windows XP Pro box, I immediately got a blue screen of death when booting up for the first time. The system would boot fine in safe mode. The message provided was “An attempt was made to execute to non-executable memory.”. The error code was 0X000000FC. The fix for this was to edit the boot.ini file and make the following change. Start->settings->control panel->system->advanced->startup and recovery settings->edit. Change the “/NoExecute=OptIn” to “/NoExecute=alwaysoff”

I recently brought a 10 year old XP Pro machine back from the dead with a new motherboard/cpu/memory. Everything was working except in both Firefox and Internet Explorer the act of scrolling caused massive screen redraw problems and black horizontal lines to appear in the browser window. Also, the scroll bars would be out of position and sometimes 2 scroll bars would draw although only 1 would work. I thought this was a video driver problem, but it wasn’t!
This problem was fixed by disabling the dual core cpu so it would only use a single core. In the system bios this was turned off by choosing Advanced->cpu configuration->unleashing mode->disabled. This system uses an Asus M4A77TD with an AMD Sempron 140 2.7GHz and DDR3 1066 PC3 8500 RAM.