BSOD only on a "cold start". Why would this be?

Factual Questions
#1

I’m still playing phone tag with the tech people for the company I bought my laptop from concerning my other problem (mentioned in another thread)–its inability to wake from sleep or hibernate states correctly.

There’s this other problem though.

It gave me a BSOD the very first time I turned it on. And it’s given me four more BSODs since then. So yes, I got a lemon, but we’ll get that taken care of as soon as we’re all on the phone at the same time. :wink:

Meanwhile, there’s something strange about the BSODs. They only happen on what you might call a “cold start.” By this, I mean they only happen when the laptop has been powered down for several hours. If I were to turn it off and then immediately back on right now, then, based on experience so far, it would not BSOD. But if I were to turn it off and then wait several hours and turn it back on later, then, based on experience so far, it would inevitably BSOD.

It always BSODs sometime during the boot sequence or initial login sequence. In other words, always sometime before I actually see a desktop, but sometimes after I put in my user account password. (Windows 7 home premium 64.)

The BSOD message is different every time so far. I’ve had

something about the cache
MEMORY_MANAGEMENT
PFN_LIST_CORRUPT
PAGE_FAULT_IN_A_NON_PAGED_AREA
IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

But anyway, what’s really mysterious to me is, why does his only happen on a “cold start”? Anyone seen this before?

I googled it, and saw a lot of people complaining of BSODS only on what they called a “cold start” but none of them made it completely clear what they meant by this, and no respondants seemed interested in the fact it was only on a “cold start” and instead offered standard BSOD advice about drivers and memory and so on.

ETA An idea that comes to mind is that something isn’t connected properly to something somewhere in there, such that when the computer is cold certain bits of metal that should be touching aren’t touching (or that shouldn’t be, are) but once it gets warm those bits of metal have thereby moved so that they are (or alternatively, aren’t) touching.

Does this sound plausibile?

#2

That’s possible. There’s a thing called a “cold solder joint” which is when a type of poor solder joint on a circuit board that can be caused by things like the solder not being hot enough to flow properly when the circuit board was manufactured. This can make an intermittent connection which may be better or worse with temperature changes.

It’s also possible that you have something poorly seated (RAM or CPU most likely) that is also making an intermittent connection.

Third, modern disk drives are so small and high precision that they require temperature compensation when they move and place the read/write heads over the platters. If this isn’t working you can end up with garbled data coming from the drive.

Electronic components that have been damaged by static electricity can also exhibit strange behaviors like this.

Temperature dependence usually points to a hardware problem of some sort. Software drivers and such generally don’t care about the temperature.

#3

what’s BSOD?

#4

Blue Screen Of Death

#5

Things expand with heat so a very small circuit trace break may make good contact when warm and not so great when cold.

Try reseating the RAM chips.