Okay, so tonight my friend got on his computer. Doing simple things such as msn messenger, a view internet thingies, windows media player, and burning some cds when his computer all of a sudden froze restarted but everytime he restarts at one point you see a blue screen of death really quick for a split second and the boot starts up again...i unplugged some components on the inside and its not the memory, cd rom drive and it shouldn't be the motherboard. I'm thinking something went wrong with the PSU or the hard drive...is it those two things or something else?
My friends comp
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07mackenzie said:
I agree. After you run memtest, try going into Safe Mode. If you get into Safe Mode without incident, go to the Event Viewer within Administrative Tools and look under the System category for any errors that occurred about the time that the BSOD occurred.
Also a little food for the thought. My brother's computer had some spontaneous rebooting, it was due to the fact that the person who built it set it to reboot upon error. When we finally got to the event viewer, there was DISK_ERROR, and then we troubleshooted it to a bad HDD IDE cable. You might want to check that if the memory checks out OK.
www.memtest86.com
Burn onto a CD or save to a diskette and test your memory. I bet it has something to do with your memory.
Burn onto a CD or save to a diskette and test your memory. I bet it has something to do with your memory.
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Depends what the error message is. Normally a BSOD is associated with RAM, but the error message it gives, when you google it (remember google is your friend), it will give you a whole page full of answers to what it does. I recommend finding what error message it is giving (it will be shown towards the top in all capitols and maybe some underscores _ ).
As far as memtest86, I would download ISOBuster (http://www.isobuster.com/isobusterdownload.htm DOWNLOAD PAGE) to extract the iso file. Then once you extract the iso file you can make a bootable floppy or bootable CD, whichever is easier for you. If you have a standard 3.5 inch floppy drive in your computer that's failing, just copy the extracted contents of the iso file onto a blank floppy and boot with it like a startup disk. That would be the easiest way to go.
Hope this helps you with your rebooting issue.
As far as memtest86, I would download ISOBuster (http://www.isobuster.com/isobusterdownload.htm DOWNLOAD PAGE) to extract the iso file. Then once you extract the iso file you can make a bootable floppy or bootable CD, whichever is easier for you. If you have a standard 3.5 inch floppy drive in your computer that's failing, just copy the extracted contents of the iso file onto a blank floppy and boot with it like a startup disk. That would be the easiest way to go.
Hope this helps you with your rebooting issue.
Kage
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Yeah, I assosiate alot of blue screens with RAM also.
I've never used a RAM tester though, but sometimes these aren't 100% accurate I find.
If its crashing an awful lot, it is more likely to be the RAM.
I doubt its the hard drive what so ever. I've never seen a hard drive display a BSOD and then to cause the cmoputer to restart straight away like that. That seems more deeply internal to me, which suggests to me RAM.
I've never used a RAM tester though, but sometimes these aren't 100% accurate I find.
If its crashing an awful lot, it is more likely to be the RAM.
I doubt its the hard drive what so ever. I've never seen a hard drive display a BSOD and then to cause the cmoputer to restart straight away like that. That seems more deeply internal to me, which suggests to me RAM.
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Kage said:
I agree, the BSODs, if they were HD related, would be more intermittent than constant. At least that's the way they were on my brother's computer, only like once a week at most.
Well, i checked his error log and on the date that his computer messed up a CMOS error occured and his grandparents said their computer did the same thing, so i'm thinking the CMOS battery is dead...or can i reset something? If not...how much does a new battery cost?
Kage
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You can reset it, but I doubt that'd cause the BSOD errors your encounting.
Check in your motherboard manual, or on the main board, for a CMOS jumper.
If you set that jumper to another position, it takes power away from the chip, wiping it straight away, and then you can turn on the computer straight away.
If not, you'll have to remove the whole battery, and keep it out for a while. I don't know how long, but compared with the CMOS jumper, it takes longer.
Check in your motherboard manual, or on the main board, for a CMOS jumper.
If you set that jumper to another position, it takes power away from the chip, wiping it straight away, and then you can turn on the computer straight away.
If not, you'll have to remove the whole battery, and keep it out for a while. I don't know how long, but compared with the CMOS jumper, it takes longer.
