New
#1
Various BSODs during startup and/or within early usage.
Hello,
Recently I’ve been a variety of strange issues which usually result in bluescreens. It usually happens while I’m just browsing the internet or digging around in my files. My mouse freezes or lags behind a bit and I know within the next second, I’m about to get a bluescreen. It doesn’t happen during any major games or running any major programs –but I don’t really get much of a chance to run anything big. The chance of this happening is higher just off a cold boot –when I start/use my computer for the first time during the day.
After the bluescreen, what happens next varies, such as (but not always):
I’ve had my computer have trouble to boot after getting the bluescreen: Press switch, fans spin up and nothing shows up on screen. Power off, try again, then it works. I suspect that if I try to power on right after powering off it has trouble. Waiting a bit longer (a few more seconds) and it seems okay.
It boots, but then my bios tells me my overclocking settings are bad and prompts me to set my bios settings back to default. This is a bit amusing/odd as I don’t have anything overclocked and my bios settings are already default (with exception of the floppy drive turned off). I usually oblige anyways and reset everything to default.
Windows looks like it might load...the loading screen appears with the words “windows” but the animated logo never appears. It just hangs here until I power off and try again.
It manages to boot in to windows, but after I type in my password, login, and get to my desktop, I get an instant bluescreen. Sometimes, I don’t even get to type in my password. =_=
If I try safemode, sometimes I get in and it bluescreens after a short while. Or sometimes it’ll bluescreen right away.
Windows repair attempts to repair for a long time before giving up (says it can’t find anything wrong). It also prompts me to try system restore which has worked once in getting me back to my desktop...only to bluescreen again after a short time of usage.
Thing’s I’ve done:
First, I’ve updated my video card drivers and ran windows update.
Tried to boot in to my other windows partition (winXP), it bluescreens as well.
I figure maybe it’s hardware as I can’t even make it in to windows some of the time and seems to happen to both win7 and xp, where I haven’t touched my xp partition for a quite long time. So, I test my ram with memtest86+ and I get red errors. I have four sticks of ram, 1gb each so I pull each one out and test one by one. Each one passes after running for all ten tests. I also try different slots one at a time and don’t see any issues. I try all four sticks together again and I get no issues. As a side note: I also make sure to plug them in, in the same order and facing direction (just to be consistent). The system is just over five years old and all sticks of ram were from the same batch, so I doubt it is ram compatibility errors (though at this point I really don’t know what to look at).
I’ve also reinstalled windows7.
At this point, I should mentioned that this isn’t the first time I’ve encountered the above, but after pulling my ram and putting it back in as well as reinstalling windows, it seemed to have solved the issue a month or so back.
But it seems the problem has reared its ugly head again and this time reseating my ram and going through memtest does nothing. I don’t really want to reinstall windows again (both of these, I suspect it was just a ‘magical temporary fix’ anyway). And when I do get to my desktop every so often and can use my computer, I’m afraid it’ll bluescreen so I’m hesitant to do any work on it. And it happens to be my main working computer. =/
I can’t seem to find any pattern and I don’t really know what to try next so here I am. I’m hoping someone can shed some light on what could be the cause, so at least I’ll know if I need a new computer or not. =b
In the attached files, there are only five minidumps which are the ones that happen when I reach the desktop. But I’ve seen more then five; there are a few bluescreens I get that don’t seem to ‘dump’.