How to solve the Blue Screen of Death when Using GNS3 on Windows 7 or 8

When you are using GNS3 on Win 7/8 and if you stop the router, you get a blue screen saying your PC ran into some problem with the following error:

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

Your PC will restart after this error :(

After doing some research on the GNS3 forum and reading the users experience, I found 2 solutions to this problem:

1. Run GNS3 on a LINUX Distro e.g DEBIAN or UBUNTU (FYI: A Linux Distro is always more stable than Windows)

2.If you are not comfortable with LINUX then you can still use WINDOWS but make sure you run the following CISCO IOS Images according to a post (please see extract below) on the CISCO LEARNING NETWORK  by Navneet.Gaur :

“These are the stable working IOS images for GNS 3.

I have some of them as I own the routers.

1

Cisco 2691 Router | 2600 Series - Extremely stable

     c2691-adventerprisek9_ivs-mz.124-9.T7.bin

2

Cisco 3640 Router | 3600 Series

     c3640-ik9o3s-mz.124-25.bin

3

Cisco 3725 Router | 3700 Series - For MPLS

     c3725-adventerprisek9-mz.124-15.T5.bin 

4

Cisco 7200 Router - Extremely stable

     c7200-advipservicesk9-mz.124-2.T.bin

     c7200-advipservicesk9-mz.150-1.M.bin - For SLA”

I don’t promise that your PC will not crash but you can still try.

I tried the “c2691-adventerprisek9-mz.124-5a.bin” image…its really stable on Windows 8.

I can start and stop the router..No BSOD so far J

1 tip when using GNS3: After you have started your router on GNS3, right click on it and calculate a new idle-pc value. You will be presented with a list of values choose the one starting with an asterix (*)

Hope this helps you in preparing for your Cisco CCNP Exams..Good Luck !!!