I have a Dell XPS machine that’s a few years old running Vista that seems to have some consistent problems that seem to be getting worse as of late. Probably once a day a blue screen of death occurs, often with varying messages as to why. This is on top of various processes (host process, superfetch, etc.) crashing at various times throughout the day. Also, it seems to want to run a scandisk (or was it checkdisk?) upon rebooting… Every… Single… Time… Which is pretty frustrating if I reboot it and forget to stick around to cancel the scan.
I plan on doing a clean install of Vista on it soon but I want to ensure it’s not a hardware problem first. Could it be bad memory or a bad harddrive that’s causing this? I seem to recall various error messages related to memory a while back. And it seems whenever I run scandisk or checkdisk there are no diagnostic results that appear afterwards (perhaps it’s saving them in a log file somewhere?).
Are there any other (free) tools that are recommended to check for bad components? If it’s hardware issues that end up being the culprit I might just end up getting a new computer… Thanks for the input!
chkdsk results are in the event manager in an entry called Winlogon. At least they are in XP. If you have any bad sectors you probably have a bad drive.
You can test memory with microsofts memory diagnostic tool.
You can also update your drivers to see if it helps.
I take it you either never ran Windows 95/98/Me, or you have a very short memory.
Anyway, it could be memory. First step, run memtest86+ (maybe try it overnight, it takes a while) to make sure your memory is okay. Then you can move on to other problems (some screwed up driver, hard drive, power supply).
Vista isn’t as bad as most people claim it is, and it’s pretty stable with the proper service packs installed. Sure, it caused a few more problems than XP, but when compared to 98 or ME or essentially anything before 2000, it’s light years ahead. And I really think this is a hardware issue or a conflicting software issue (which a clean install should fix).
Thanks for the memtest link! I’ll run it tonight as I begin the arduous process of backing up the files I wish to keep.
Well, if you’re getting BSOD’s, what I would do is diagnose those first. Make a note of the STOP code and that other gibberish and google it or post it back here.
If the computer is rebooting itself before you get a chance to read the BSOD screen, change that behavior by going to Control Panel -> System (might need to switch to Classic view, not sure) -> Advanced System Settings on the left side -> Advanced tab -> Settings button in Startup and Recovery Box -> uncheck “Automatically restart” in the System failure box (might as well also check “Write an event to the System log”).
