Bluie

Hope someone can help as it's a right PITA.

PC is P4 3.6GHz with 2GB Ram and 2 250G HDs.

Machine was running Vista Business for a while with no problems, however recently it had been freezing then the Blue screen of Death. Tried various things but nothing working could boot in safe mode only.

Spent 2 hrs this morning from 5am removing the master HD and installing XP then SP2, it is OK with XP only but as soon as SP2 is installed this drive no flashes the BSOD.

Any one able to shed some light onto this would be much appreciated.

Are both HD knackered or is the complete machine shot or is it something else.

Luminous

iTrader: (3)

How are your drives connected?
Have you looked for viruses?

Bluie

The HD with Vista is not connected now, the other is in the normal way.

The disk was scanned for viruses, defraged and formatted.

The only things connected are, power cable, screen and wired keyboard, but it still bombs out on SP2 or Vista

StiSi

it could be the drivers you are using for the graphic or sound etc. They might be dodgy versions.

warrenm2

or maybe your memory is on its way out, dodgy memory was infamous on NT for BSOD

Bluie

Thanks for the replies someone is looking at the memory log see if that helps.

Computers are a PITA when they decide to go wrong, guess a bit like cars and relationships

BlkKnight

what is the BSOD message?

Bluie

When it's using SP2 it flashes up to quickly to read.

With Vista it says it's dumping memory at the end, not had a chance to read the whole page as it disappears too quick

warrenm2

also has anyone been messing with the BIOS settings, like memory timings for example?

Is there an updated BIOS version available that may fix some problems?

BlkKnight

If there's nothing in the event log about the hard drives dieing (read sector errors) then it's probabily a memory fault.

go here:

Memtest86.com - Memory Diagnostic

Burn the test to CD, boot from said CD and let it run overnight.

bioforger

iTrader: (1)

Vista is prone to BSODs with bad ram to. I suspect a bad dimm.

Kieran_Burns

iTrader: (1)

You might find this useful: Debugging Tools for Windows - Overview

windbg allows you to read he dump files. I've found it invaluable in tracing obscure issues with our Servers

Bluie

Thanks for all the replies, it would appear that it is the graphics card driver which has been sorted.

I will also be changing the memory to 4GB

Once again many thanks

Nick