My wife's desktop Pc (Win XP) has over the past few months more and more frequently displayed the famous 'blue screen of death'. We live in Vientiane, and all our local technician can do is siphon off the content of the data on the HD, re- formatt the HD, re-load Win XP pro, reload all the programmes, re-load all the data, and say it's all OK.

Next week, same story. We're sick of it, but don't know anyone here who can do better. Anyone know of a UT computer technician who has the skill to get to the bottom of this? We're coming over topmorrow, but if I have to wait, I could come back next week.

It took me 6 hours to get this message written, becuase our connection keeps falling over.

Welcome to laos!

Kees

I have been using XP for quite some time now on 3 computers in my home on a network that also has a computer running W98SE, one that runs W95 and one that has WNT. I have never had the "BSOD" on any of the XP computers. Having 2 (young adult) children that still live with me who also use them they get treated pretty poorly with the exception of this one. Most problems are caused by video drivers but if the computer was working correctly and you have not changed anything and the problem just started happening then I think that if I were in your situation I would start looking at the possibility of an intermittent hardware failure. Diskdrive about to fail? video card?

However, I do not have ANY experience with windows versions outside of the U.S. and do not know if they are the same or not. Some program code generated inside the U.S. is not available for export so your flavor of XP may be different than I am used to.

Do you feel competant enough to open the pc up?

Just to check that everything that is connected to the motherboard is well connected and not sitting in the socket a bit looser than it should.

Kees,
What Sean siggests is worth doing. If that doesn't fix it then I suggest that you read this site
Blue screen of death
Which seems to suggest that you may have issues with faulty sectors on your hard disk..

I also found this while cruising the net
Fix BSOD for Free
But I have seen 'for free' on sites before and it ends up by being nothing like free and i have never used, so can't verify as to its use. But if it is really for free then is probably worth a go.

Also next time it happens (hopefully never) try to get and write down the code that appears on the BSOD, that will help pinpoint the actual problem.

That little program is pretty good Bob, it seems pretty thorough, and it even found a couple of abnormalities on my system, which I always endeavour to keep squeeky clean, nice find

But the free bit wasn't exactly true, as I suspected...
Scan for free (and show you where the problems were) but to fix all the problems $32 registration....Oh well, worth it if it solves BSOD but they didn't get my $32s worth...

Bob, if you need a user name and password then pm me

This might be of interest. Talks about Dell, but all PC's could have same problem, even Apple!

BSOD


Sorry Cnet seems to not be working, but it a story about PCs Plagued by Bad Capacitors which cause BSOD. So if you pop box open, can look for problem. There are pictures on the net, if you do a google "capacitors" but seem to point to cnet.

I was getting it on my new HP Pavilion NoteBook. After the next boot-up the machine would lock up when I put it in 'Stand By' or would it not 'Shut Down' correctly. After a little pissing around I traced the problem to the way I had my USB attachments distributed between the USB Ports and the 4 port expander. By moving my wireless mouse off the expander and connection it directly into the machine the problem disappeared.

Kees, I have sent you a private message which includes some suggestions from my friend who is an electronics engineer and something of a computer expert.

I emailed him a copy of your posting and asked for his comments. I have copied his reply below and hope it maybe of some help.

Quote:-

When he gets a BSOD it tells you what caused the error.

It normally says some driver or something crashed. The chances of it being software related is probably quite low. Normally its a sign of hardware failure.

First being the RAM in the computer is faulty. So what he needs to do, is take out his old ram and have new ram put in. If he knows someone with a computer maybe he can borrow some, or speak to the local PC shop and tell them, that he will buy the ram if this is what the problem is.

The second most likely hardware failure is the Graphics card. Maybe it has a FAN on it, and the FAN has broken (Extremely common fault) and it over heats and the computer crashes.

They are the 2 most caused problems of BSOD. But crucially he needs to tell me or someone what the BSOD is saying. It should say something like - Faulty Driver XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Or words to that effect. My friend bought a new computer similar to yours, and he kept on crashing. It said something like - NVID_DRIV_4.DLL caused the problem

This refers to graphic card drivers, Nvidia Graphics Card. So I installed the latest version on his computer and it still crashed, so we changed the Graphics Card and it worked fine.

I hope that helps!

Unquote.

Loose hardware or a messed up driver are the only causes that I know of which will cause a BSOD