ZBook Firefly 15 G7 has random crashes while processing load is light

[gkline]

The BSOD error is one of the worst... you're in the middle of doing something and your system crashes completely. If you're in the middle of a Zoom call, to the other parties you vanish... while your system restarts.

My ZBook would suffer the BSOD at random intervals. Mostly while I'm using browsers on various websites, such as forums. I'm in the middle of a reply, refreshing a page, or submitting a search criteria and suddenly... BSOD. I could go several days without it happening. Then suddenly in one day I might experience it twice. I look at the Event Viewer and pretty much the same entries appear. System detected an abnormal shutdown and recovered. If there's one saving grace? Recovery is quick! Not nearly as laborious when under Windows 10. But I must say, I very rarely suffered such crashes under Windows 10 using my old HP Pavilion.

OK, to get to the meat of it. My keyboard ended up with a near catastrophic failure -- the "T" key popped off and it would not seat back on. I contacted HP support, and basically I was told I need to send in the laptop to be repaired, the keyboard replaced. A pain in the you-know-what, but I figured now was a good time to have HP also check into this random crash problem.

HP was superb. My keyboard was replaced. And they also replaced the memory (32Gb) and battery, then flashed the BIOS with the latest firmware and performed extensive testing. Everything passed. Great! I got my ZBook back in 5 business days.

My first order of business was to run my ZBook and drain the battery down to 6% to "flex" the battery chemistry. And after 2 hours, just browsing a website? CRASH!. The dreaded BSOD. Recovery was quick. I was back up in about 40 seconds. But wow... new memory, refreshed bios... latest Windows 11 22H2 22621.2283... and it still happens? I was using Google Chrome and looking at an auction site. I refreshed the page to be sure I had the latest data. Then the BSOD.

The ZBook Firefly has a great track record. It's the best HP notebook I've owned thus far. It excels in so many ways. So I can't believe this is a design flaw. I can't imagine this is a hardware issue.  Some strange driver issue? What's the fastest, painless way to troubleshoot this, without having to completely reinstall my operating system? 

To be sure, I ran  "sfc /scannow" and verification completed 100%.

"Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations."

I also ran "dism.exe /online /cleanup-image /scanhealth" and it verified image version 10.0.22621.2283, stating "The component store is repairable. The operation completed successfully.".

And I also ran "dism.exe /online /cleanup-image /checkhealth", and it repeated the same thing.

My selected Critical Event log:

Event 1001, BugCheck
The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x0000000a (0xffffd681960b8578, 0x0000000000000002, 0x0000000000000000, 0xfffff8027c83adcf). A dump was saved in: C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\091823-16250-01.dmp. Report Id: 6da3dbe7-279f-4147-9f2c-552c2904e469.

Event 41, Kernel-Power
The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly.

Event 6008, EventLog
The previous system shutdown at 2:41:16 AM on ‎9/‎18/‎2023 was unexpected.

Event 20, Kernel-Boot
The last shutdown's success status was false. The last boot's success status was true.

Any recommendation as to what troubleshooting I should do?

[gkline]

OK, I installed the Windows SDK Debugging tool and loaded the Minidump that was delivered on the crash.

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL (a)
An attempt was made to access a pageable (or completely invalid) address at an
interrupt request level (IRQL) that is too high. This is usually
caused by drivers using improper addresses.
If a kernel debugger is available get the stack back trace.

Arguments:
Arg1: ffffd681960b8578, memory referenced
Arg2: 0000000000000002, IRQL
Arg3: 0000000000000000, bitfield :
bit 0 : value 0 = read operation, 1 = write operation
bit 3 : value 0 = not an execute operation, 1 = execute operation (only on chips which support this level of status)
Arg4: fffff8027c83adcf, address which referenced memory

PROCESS_NAME: Photoshop.exe

But, it's not just that process. See others from prior dumps:

PROCESS_NAME: services.exe

PROCESS_NAME: wermgr.exe

PROCESS_NAME: System

Other fault:

PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA (50)
Invalid system memory was referenced. This cannot be protected by try-except.
Typically the address is just plain bad or it is pointing at freed memory.
Arguments:
Arg1: ffff8100109d07b0, memory referenced.
Arg2: 0000000000000000, value 0 = read operation, 1 = write operation.
Arg3: fffff8047038f7a3, If non-zero, the instruction address which referenced the bad memory
address.
Arg4: 0000000000000002, (reserved)

Since the RAM was replaced at this is still happening, I'm expecting that this isn't a hardware issue. When HP serviced my ZBook, they indicated a thorough test and everything passed. So, perhaps there's some system file issue? These processes cited as triggering the crash don't have that level of control--it's how the OS handles process requests. So I'm thinking, since tests for corruption all pass, that there's an obscure defect that is periodically getting triggered. 

How should I proceed?

[gkline · Accepted solution]

I went ahead and for safe measure performed UEFI tests.

It was the memory test that revealed a possible hardware issue.

Memory Test Failure
Failure ID: MBQB6K-AH2BQ6-MFGG2K-40BD03
Memory Module 1 Bottom-Slot 1(left)
Component Test: FAILED

I don't understand how this is possible, since HP Service said they replaced the memory. The basic quick memory test failed on it, which is remarkable.