Hmm PC crashing? Why?

[ezdesigns]

Not too long ago I purchased a Dell XPS.

It wasnt untill recently my computer started to randomly and involuntarly restart. Its was not just any old restart, it was a crash. Screen goes blank, HD stops and turns back on.

So I figure maybe its overheating. I put the case on top of the desk, left the side panel off, and even did a little dust off. hours later "boom" restarts... So now, I decided to do normal disk clean-up things. Defrag, Disk clean-up, registry scan, adware scan, blah blah.

During the defrag, it restarted. I ran defrag again, when it finished... things were funky, Internet does not work, IE itself does not operate... Besides things being wierd and acting up, thats all thats not functional.

Anyways, any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Erik

[nihil]

Hi Erik,

That does not sound good, if you have a crash in the middle of a defrag, all sorts of nasty things can happen.

You don't say, but as the machine is recent I will guess that you are running Windows XP.

Please try to get into Event Viewer and see if there is anything in the system logs.

Also go into your BIOS set up (probably F2 if it is a Dell) and turn off

1. Quick boot
2. Restart on error (hopefully that will enable the onscreen error messages)
3. Power management

Go into safe mode and run chkdsk then defrag it.

Do you have any hardware monitoring such as PC Health..........if so what are your temperatures?

Also, run your scans in safe mode if you can.

I am guessing that you now have a corrupted Windows installation. You might try booting from the CD and taking the "repair" option from the Windows installation.

To be honest, with something that got screwed up the way you describe I would have thought that a format and reinstall is your most likely solutuion............. at least from a reliability/stability viewpoint.

However you do seem to have a hardware issue, and you really should try to solve that first or this will just happen again.

[r3b00+]

Also what you could try is right click My Computer click properties, click the advanced tab, under startup and recovery click settings, under system failure remove the tick from automatically restart if it is ticked. This option will display a STOP error before the system reboots if this is the problem. If you do get a STOP error i.e. blue screen of death, then the problem is most likely a driver problem. You can then determine what driver is causing this error by clicking start>run then type sigverif and click OK. Run the sigverif tool which will check all installed drivers for a ms digital signature. If the results of this test show any unsigned drivers then you can remove any dodgy drivers.
Also you can can check all system files are in order and that no dll's have been overwritten by dodgy drivers by clicking start>run and typing sfc /scannow, this will repair any system files if they have been corrupted.

HTH

[The Texan]

One note to add to this, when you run the sfc /scannow its prolly gonna ask you for your Win XP Pro/home cd so you should have it handy and if your XP cd doesnt have service pack 2 loaded on it ( mine doesnt ) then the sfc cmd wont seem to work.

[ezdesigns]

Thank you all very much...

I took Nihil's advice and ran a disk check from safe mode... told me some errors were fixed.

I also removed the auto restart feature and maybe 10 minutes after the feature was applied, i got the blue screen of death. I simply re-installed all drivers like HTH said and things seem to be working great.

Thank you all, very big help!

[nihil]

Hi Erik,

Thank you for the feedback, it is always good to find out what worked, as it helps to improve the support service.

[r3b00+]

Originally posted here by ezdesigns
I simply re-installed all drivers like HTH said and things seem to be working great.

lol

HTH: Hope This Helps

Glad you got it sorted

[ezdesigns]

lol, man im such a forum newb....

I meant thank you r3b00+

[r3b00+]

np: no problem