After almost 6 years of faithful service, my computer has started giving me the notorious blue screen of death. It may or may not have anything to do with a recent few hours of light-flickering power weirdness in the neighborhood. Yes, I have a surge suppressor. Nothing in particular triggers it - sometimes I can surf for hours, sometimes it appears before the computer is fully booted.
What I have done:[ol]
[li]run a registry scan[/li][li]run a virus/spybot scan[/li][li]restored it to a week before it started happening[/li][li]gave it to a geek friend who said it seemed fine to him[/li][li]vacuumed out a herd of prolific dustbunnies[/li][/ol] The BSOD doesn’t give me a specific error message. The alpha-numeric strings change every time, except for the first and the last one. And, like I said, there is no common precursor to the crash. I could be surfing or playing a stupid on-line arcade game or using Excel or writing email.
I am a skilled user, but I’m timid when it comes to touching anything inside the magical box. I seek the wisdom of DoperGeeks before I cave and take it to a paid geek. Any ideas, suggestions, links, incantations, etc, would be gratefully appreciated. Thankfully, I can use my daughter’s computer to follow this thread.
Two things I would try: one software related, and one hardware.
The software one is easier: run the System File checker utility (Start-> Run -> sfc /scannow) and see if there are any corrupt Windows files that need to be restored. You’ll need your Windows install CD if this is the case. I’ve found that many problems can be fixed in this way.
Hardware one: remove and reseat your memory. Contact problems in memory can cause BSODs at irregular intervals, as you’ve been describing. It’s also possible that a memory module has become flaky, in which case it would need to be replaced.
Now that you mention it, someone at work suggested it might be a memory problem. I guess I can be brave enough to open the case and try that. The scan sounds doable too - thanks!
Ah – if you didn’t open the case when you vacuumed up the dust bunnies, there are likely to be lots more inside. So clean them all up, too, while you’re in there. (Be careful about vacuuming – some vacuums create a lot of static electricity, so don’t let it touch any of the electronic components inside.)
The things I think would be most likely are a heat problem, an unseated component, or a flaky hard drive.
For heat, run the computer for a while, then reboot and immediately go into the bios (usually this involves pressing F1 or some such when the computer boots - watch for a message that will tell you the magic keys to press). Somewhere in the bios there is usually a hardware monitor that will tell you the temperature of the CPU and the temperature of the case/motherboard in general. If the CPU is hotter than about 45 or 50 deg C then you’ve got a heat problem.
For an unseated component, memory (as already suggested) is the most likely suspect. The CPU or one of the expansion cards could also cause similar problems. You should read up about static discharge and how to prevent damage to electrical components if you aren’t familiar with this topic before you go poking around inside the case.
A flaky hard drive can cause problems like this, especially if it gets a read or write error while operating on the windows page file. This tends to cause windows to dump right onto its backside. Usually this has other symptoms, like disk corruption errors (little pop boxes coming up saying an error occurred) or programs crashing, but it is possible that all you get is the BSOD. You can run scandisk to check the disk for errors.
Never use a vacuum cleaner to clean dust out of a computer unless you know for certain that it’s the type of vacuum that is safe to work on electronics (doesn’t generate static like a normal vacuum cleaner does). It’s better to go down to ye ol local electronics store and buy yourself a can of compressed air and use that to blow the dust out of the case.
I did open the case (at least my son-in-law did because I couldn’t figure out how… :rolleyes: ) in order to extract the dust bunnies. SIL also had a can or compressed air that he used liberally - I used the hose and one of the accessory components to suck out the big pieces as well as attempt to clean the vents from the outside. The actual vacuum cleaner was on the floor several feet from the computer.
OK, two times I wrote down the codes, this is what it said:
It seemed that the only ones that changed were the 2 in the middle, and since they were always different, I quit writing anything down. It also said something about changing video adaptors.
Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention - many times when I’m booting up, I get a little window that says there was an error and asks if I want to report it to Microsoft. I’ve gotten them periodically for a long time - sometimes when I sent the report, it just closed all of my windows, but the computer continued to work fine. Perhaps that was a precursor? It seems to happen more frequently now.
Regarding unseated components - can that happen even tho the CPU pretty much sits in one place undisturbed between the desk and the wall? It’s not likely to be accidentally bumped or anything.
Thanks for all the suggestions - I’ll have a go at it later today when I clear my house of my guests.
Most unseated components actually aren’t caused by physical motion of the computer, but rather by the constant expansion-contraction cycles caused by heating when you turn your computer off and on.
Turn it on -> component heats up -> expands
Turn if off -> component cools down -> contracts
Lather, rinse and repeat a few dozen or hundred times, and things start to move around, even when they are ostensibly clipped firmly in place. I can’t quite recall who said this, but someone has stated that there are two ideal states for a computer - always on or always off, in part to avoid these thermal stress effects and increase longevity.
I’m getting quite the education here - thank you all! Between this thread and some suggestions I got at work, it sounds like checking the memory is the next logical step.
I should make a note so I remember… <— feeble attempt at humor
thats a direct link to download an .iso you should be able to burn onto a cd with any common burner software. Use it to boot your PC and it will thoroughly test your ram. Give it an hour or so to run, if you see red, you have a ram or memory controller problem.
Running Memtest, Memtest+, or Microsoft’s memory diagnostic is a good idea. You can get all of these in one easy package with the Ultimate Boot CD. It also has several other useful utilities and is generally handy to have around.
While you’ve got the case open, visually inspect the motherboard for bad capacitors. They can cause all kinds of bizarre problems, including bluescreens and random reboots.
