So, here's the situation. A few days ago, I was sitting at my Church and I opened my laptop which had been in sleep mode only to find that it wasn't in sleep mode and instead had nice blue screen of death with the message "IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL" on it. I quickly jotted down some of the info that looked important and shut down the computer figuring that if it shows up again I'll really start worrying. I thought that perhaps some malware was causing it and figured I would try running Malwarebytes and see if anything comes up. Nothing did, however my computer seemed to be working fine and ran for a significant amount of time before blue screening of death again with the same error message in the middle of a Skype conversation. I rebooted and, still thinking it could be caused by malware, decided to run a rescue disk on it the next day. It then crashed again with the same message, this time after a rather short period. I decided to do some more research on the problem at this point, and learned that it is usually caused by a bad driver. However, I hadn't installed any programs or began using new devices within the past week (month for devices) and each case of crashing had no real pattern to them in the sense that I wasn't using the exact same programs each time it occurred. The only piece of external hardware I was using with my computer was my external hard drive, which I got well over two month's ago and have had no problems with it yet. Anyway, I ran my rescue disk a couple of hours ago and it found nothing. So, I'm guessing that if it is malware, its in my data kernel. However, from extra reading I've been doing, I'm beginning to wonder if it could be caused by bad RAM, an overheating problem (which my computer does have a history with...), or because I've been unable to update the drivers for my video card since nVidia is being stupid and doesn't seem to be posting updates for it anymore on their website (or have stopped making those drivers completely...honestly I don't know...). I'm going to try some other tests and check the debug report to try and see if I can get some more information.
To make a long story short, I'm looking for advice and knowledge to deal with this problem since it's new to me and I really don't know what I'm doing. I also have some questions that I either want answered or have found answers but want to confirm them with individuals who I know actually know (or can find) legitimate answers to them. Off the top of my head, I'm wondering if this isn't being caused by malware, will reformatting/nuking my hard drive and reinstalling my OS fix the problem if its software related?