Hello everyone,
This is my first post here, as it seems like the people on this forum are very helpful. This post is kinda long, but I want to include every possible detail in this situation. My parents bought an HP media center edition PC almost 5 years ago. It was running Vista Home Premium, and it ran very well for some time. But in the last month or so, it's crashed a lot and has had multiple blue screens. It eventually came to the point where it wouldn't even boot anymore. So, I purchased a copy of 7, backed up the HDD and did a clean install. Well, it refused to boot. It would stay stuck on a black screen with a flashing cursor in the top left corner of the monitor. I suspected the graphics card, opened up the case, and found that the capacitors on the card itself had leaked. I think the fan on the card might have died and the card overheated. Anyway, I took it out and inspected the rest of the hardware. It all looked O.K, so I closed it up, turned it on, and I booted. But..... it didn't end there. Windows 7 was working fine at first. I installed updates, drivers, etc. I was installing some program when I got the first BSOD. Rebooted, same thing happened. Tried unplugging unnecessary components. Still, I got the BSOD. It crashed maybe 8-10 times. I then wanted to give Vista a try, just to see if that worked. So I wiped the drive again, installed vista. Halfway through the install, BSOD. I had to restart the installation 3 times to get it to work. Once it finally finished, I started updating it and installed the necessary drivers. Vista works for about 10-30 minutes, the the entire system freezes and I have to force reboot it. Then Vista kept getting various BSOD's after reboot and while I'm using it. I'm so puzzled right now. I think its a hardware conflict, but I don't even know where to begin. I'm normally pretty good at finding a solution to problems such as this, but I am really stuck on this one. Does anyone know what is most likely the problem? Does anyone have any suggestions to what is causing this? Your reply's are much appreciated!
Specs:
HP Pavilion Media Center m8300f PC
AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 6000 3.0Ghz
NVIDIA nForce 430 Chipset
3Gb DDR2
500Gb HDD- SATA
DVD/CD Burner- SATA