BSOD o my

I'm getting repeated BSOD's, like a lot, sometimes it takes 3-5 times just a boot up, then all of a sudden t he computer will work for 8 hours straight without a problem. RUnning alienware aurora 7700, duel AMD Athlon(tm) 64 FX-60 Dual Core Processor, 2 gigs RAM, NVIDIA GeForce Go 7800 GTX
Adapter RAM: 256MB, VIA SATA RAID 0 SCSI Disk Device Harddrive, and XP professional. Talked with alienware tech services for hours, run RAM tests, reinstalled all new audio/graphics drivers, all to no avail. Would appreciate your help greatly. P.S. it seems to do it more frequently when I'm playing a high end game like WOW or FEAR, if it doensn't crash on bootup, and I'm doing just some word processing or net browsing I almost have no problem.

Well, let me get this straight:

1. You get a BSOD each time?................. that means it actually boots into Windows each time?...............it has to, to give you a BSOD.

2. I don't think that it is a hardware issue as it would probably fail during the boot sequence or before you logged into Windows, if you left it at logon for a while.

I would suggest the following to try to collect a bit more information:

1. Go into your BIOS and disable the automatic restart on error function (if you can) That should let you read the BSODs

2. Turn off all power saving options.

3. In Windows, get rid of power saving and screensaver.

4. Using the Event Viewer check your system and application logs.

5. Turn off automatic updates and background tasks.

6. Turn off all applications and services you do not need.

I am curious as to whether this happens when you are not connected to the internet................please try it.

Try running it offline with the AV and firewall and other interactive anti-malware turned off. It would be useful if you could play a high end game offline for this test.

I would like to know what the BSODs actually say.....................that could narrow the problem down quite a lot.

Good Luck :)

EDIT: Thread moved from GCC, as it is a support question.

fixed it, it ended up being a heating problem, i finally found a phillips small enough for the screws, took the fans off the bottom, and they were caked in dust, so much that one wasn't even moving and i haven't had a crash since. Thanks.

Thanks for the update....................very interesting!

Heat problems usually happen after a relatively consistent period of time given a consistent ambient (room) temperature. Crash on boot generally suggests that the CPU fan has failed, but this will be fairly consistent also.

If your machine has a CPU fan (it must?) and a videocard fan, I would recommend checking and cleaning those as well. It is a PITA I know, even for a big lappy like that one, but it would be a wise move IMHO.

Now the machine I am using right now has a PSU problem.............. sometimes the PSU fan doesn't start on boot so it heats up to about 32C and then I get a BSOD. I have given it a preliminary external clean and it works a lot more consistently. I have the side off and check if the fan had started............ if it hasn't I just give it a tap, and it does.

This session it didn't start and got to 28.5C so I gave it a tap and it is now at 17.8 using my trusty laser guided spot thermometer. Room temperature is currently 14.3C, so that is pretty good :) The processor is at 24.4 and the HDD at 26.6 by comparison.

All credit to the manufacturers, at least the thermal cutouts are protecting the hardware components. :)

The problem is back, was crash free for about 3 days after i cleaned the fans, but now it's doing it again. The errors that r on the bsod's number in the dozens, every type of error i've ever seen has popped up. I do get the error sometimes when i'm offline, playing FEAR for example. I've shutoff all firewalls.

Hmmm,

Try cleaning the fans again. This time check the CPU fan and video card as well.

You need to make sure that the heat sinks are clean as well ;)