Dell keeps Blue Screening

garthv

Hey lads,

Got a pain in the hole of a problem here,

My brothers 10 month old Dell keeps blue-screening for no reason whatsoever. Checked all teh hardware connections, switched the channel the RAM is in, unpluagged any unecessary bits of hardware from the motherboard and then tried to reinstall Windows.

Set boot to CD and then ran the installation program...it gets as far as unpacking all the standard drivers..still on the DOS-like blue screen and then I get the message "Now starting Windows" and then...blam! Blue screen again.

The blue screen error is something along the lines of a hardware issue, telling me to check connections and whathaveya.

Don't really want to ring Dell tech support on this one, I'm sick to my teeth of speaking to indians who can't understand a word I'm saying.

Any ideas?

The Muppet

I'd start by replacing the memory with a known good module. If that didn't fix it I would run a diagnostic scan on the hard disk.

watty

Change graphics driver.
if the Graphics card is not really compatible with an MS one-fits-all driver it will do it.

Saruman

Blue screens never actually tell you, you have a hardware error. The word hardware might appear but more often than not its a driver or some software causing it.
Problem is, its very hard to track down.
You can set windows to dump the contents, a minidump is usually enough. You can then get software to read the dump which lists everything in memory when it happened. If you know what you are looking for you can see what driver might be causing it.

Then again, could be hardware and something wrong with your memory.
I find its more often than not, a video driver issue. Usually if a game crashes and then blue screeens and it bluescreens after that during boot.

Jonathan

Could you post the actual error?

garthv

Thats the thing, I can't get into Windows,
It gets to the login screen, freezes for a good 3 minutes, the triesto load the desktop but usually blue screens before it fully loads up.

I'll get a picture of the blue screen as soon as I get a chance

auggie2k

Error codes and specific details would help, can ya post up what it says?

Blazer

Try safe mode and see if it works. If so then it's more likely to be a video driver..I'm even willing you bet you have an nvidia card..their hardware is fantastic but their drivers suck balls.

watty

Infact some drivers youo HAVE TO boot to safe mode, delete the existing (wrong driver), install correct downloaded driver and reboot.

The Muppet

Mathew Reilly wrote: »

Try safe mode and see if it works. If so then it's more likely to be a video driver..I'm even willing you bet you have an nvidia card..their hardware is fantastic but their drivers suck balls.

Maybe I'm missing something but as I understand the OP his system is freezing halfway through an xp install. He will not have a safe mode to get into .

Archytas

This sounds like the aul PCI thingymajiggy issue. Try installing a SP1/2 slipstreamed version of Xp and that should do the trick.

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/sp1_slipstream.asp

That should do it.