My Dad is preparing to give his old PC away so he can set up his new imac. He reckons a full format, then reinstall of Windows will be enough security since it's only going to another member of the family. It's a Dell Dimension 9100, with 160GB hard drive and 512MB RAM. His problem is that when he reboots after the install, he doesn't get as far as Windows before it blue screens.

Normally I'd say memory, except it seems very coincidental to happen right now. I remember once having blue screens myself and everyone said "memory" before I system restored it to before some windows updates. I just knew that it had only started on a reboot after updates.

I can take across 1GB DDR RAM from here to test that theory out tomorrow when I go over, or does anyone have oher ideas? The disc must have been the full OS, though there was also a hidden recovery partition plus recovery discs (which seems very strange, why do both?)

I was thinking of taking my XP disc in case it's the actual disc itself, maybe got scratched or whatever. If anyone can add to this I'd be grateful.