Posted on 02/25/2011 10:50:08 AM PST by webschooner
It's not 8 year old, as stated, it's 3 years old. What's stopping me? I have plenty of rat holes to put money in, and I won't spend $400 on a new machine unless it's necessary. I just bought a new Win7 machine for my wife, as mentioned This machine never slows me down in what I am doing, so it is adequate as far as speed. I'll buy a new Win7 machine if necessary, but I'm not convinced yet that it's necessary. Thanks for the thought though.
I had this happen to me and it ended up being a bad hard drive. I then had Staples install a new hard drive and within 1 1/2 weeks that hard drive started doing the same thing.
This time I learned how to install a hard drive myself and did the second one on my own. Again after 5 days this time the hard drive seized. I started some research and learned that this particular hard drive was having seize problems that the general public had no idea about. I filed a claim to the company (Seagate) and they replaced the drive free of charge. I had to inform Staples to stop selling this particular model since they kept reselling me this bogus drive.
3rd Drive now I have been using problem free for 2 years now. Check out the numbers on your hard drive to see if there are any reported issues with it.
My son got the blue screen on his laptop after 2 years of use. We just went out and purchased a new hard drive and re-loaded his software and he is running just fine. Much cheaper method than purchasing a whole new system.
Just my 2 cents!
I recently had my “8 year old clunker” hatch a Mother Board. It “blue-screened” twice and would suddenly shut down in the middle of a sentence.
Since I made the change, it's amazing all the new programs that are compatible and that open up. XP cannot run most of them these days. Compatibility mode really messes up the new 64bit format also.
For the second blue screen error check this out:
http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic101001.html
The first one to me looked exactly like my hard drive issue. The second one may not be!
Be sure to remove any other verions you have too.
Using registry cleaners is also a good way for one to turn his/her PC into a doorstop.
Any Question Marks? Unknown Devices?
Device Manager has to be happy - to have a stable machine.
Every device has a ‘sandbox’ that it plays in. If a program makes a call to a device, and that device is ‘unknown’ - no ‘sandbox’ in memory is reserved.
Like calling an un-designated phone number ... except the Kernal panics and see’s someone attempting to Read/Write to unreserved space, it throws up an obscure error like “x less than zero” and viola - BSOD.
You have a new Hard drive, memory, processor and motherboard. If you brought your wife’s HDD over PHYSICALLY, you could be having a EROM over-flow issue (disk is going bad, and your drive is out of space in it’s memory to tell the OS that certain sectors are ‘off-limits’).
If you merely brought the OS and files over - then the disk is probably OK. But, despite the obvious lies - when a drive says that MTBF is 1.2 Million hours; that’s a pretty outrageous lie. That’s about 136.9 years.
No Question marks or yellow Exclamation points in Device Manager, thanks.
Everyone has an opinion, and each is entitled to thiers.
Here’s what I would do.
There really aren’t any super-duper Hard Drive manufacturer’s out there. I like Western Digital this week, and here’s why.
They make 3 ‘grades’ of hard drive.
Green - Great for USB external drives, energy efficient, quiet and CHEAP
Blue - Probably what most PC makers install. Middle of the road drive, about $10 more than the Green, 3 yr warranty
Black - their ‘Best’, about $10 more than the Blue, 5 yr warranty.
I HATE it when a drive crashes, so if I delude myself into believing that $20 extra will buy a ‘better’ and more ‘robust’ drive - then so be it. I will gladly drop that extra $20 in the unfounded, undocumented, non-evidence supporting belief that I’m getting a ‘better’ hard drive.
Performance-wise, the Black is ‘faster’, and the 5 yr warranty from Western Digital is better than the Blue.
Your box, your money, your time ... just my 2 cents. BTW I got a 1 Terabyte drive from Best Buy for ~$100.
If you’re really into debugging your own machine.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg463016.aspx
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/041105-windows-crash.html
Thanks. That Windows Debugger looks worthwhile.
I’ve got to run an errand now. Back in awhile and will respond to additional posts then. Thanks to all who have posted so far. Much appreciated!
Your motherboard or CPU is fried.
Memory Chips are very sensitive to static electricity.
Unless you are properly ESD grounded, you may destroy your RAM. About the only physical thing you can see, anyway; is if the RAM sticks are properly installed.
Run chkdsk /p from command prompt. If you see errors, run chkdsk /r. This takes a while to run since it is seeking and repairing problems with hard drive concurrently. As it happens I fixed grandaughters BSOD problem last night.
I am reasonably technically savvy but don’t know how to access the system event log, but I’m sure I can research it and figure it out. Thanks much!
Allright thanks, I’ll try that too.
Restart your computer and press the F8 on start. If you hear a clicking sound, release the key and immediately press it down again.
You'll get to a screen with some options. pick the one that says command prompt.
Type in the following command "chkdsk /r" (minus the quotes and a space between the word and the slash) and then hit the return key. You may have to restart to have the process begin.
This will check your drive and fix any problems and recover any data. If this doesn't work, we are on to other tests.
Allright thanks. I cleaned out the box, reset the Ram, and pushed all the connections in. Now I’m running Disk Defragmenter. As soon as that is finished, I’ll run Chkdsk.
Appreciate the help!
It was my mouse that caused my problem.
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