Agent

I've been having trouble with my laptop lately. It happens when (sometimes) I right-click and every other time I Shut Down. It shows a blue screen with about 5-10 lines of text but it happens so fast I can not read it. It then restarts my computer and I have to shut it down again, hoping it will work. I have downloaded the latest Service Pack for my pc and I've looked at http://support.microsoft.com but I really don't know what to look for since I haven't had a chance to read the error message yet. Could this be a virus?

Agent

I got a chance to read the error. It was a hardware one. I read on support.microsoft.com that it maybe had to do with ram. Anyways, I don't know what to do. This is a laptop computer. I bought it online.

Derek Stone

Blue Screens of Death (BSODs) on Windows 2000 are almost always related to a hardware problem, since the OS is very stable software wise. Try checking your memory chips, insuring that they are in working condition. Roughly 10% of all memory chips have a problem due to the shear amount of them that are produced. Hence, that's usually the problem. You may also want to check that all chips are snuggly in place, your fan is working, and that there is little to no dust covering the components.

Good Luck
-CL

Thinker

And it could be something as basic as the RAM or CPU getting too
hot. Inside those notebook cases, they really pack the parts in.
Mine used to get flacky when I left it running on a desk for days at
a time. I would pick it up, and the top of the desk was hot. I
started keeping in on something that allowed better airflow under
it if I was going to leave it running in one spot for extended times.

Agent

I would rather agree with Thinker. Mine has a fan on the bottom of the notebook and it makes the desk/my lap very hot. I don't know what I'd rest it on though. I have one desk that has holes in it (a cheap desk really) but it has a computer on it. Don't know what to do about this.

Volte

You could rig up some sort of system with rubber stoppers or
something like that that allows the laptop to sit an inch or so off
the desk. It not help with making the desk hot, but it'll allow
some place for the air to go.

Agent

That is really a good idea. Only if I make it look okay. It has to look good. What would I use? Super Glue? hmmm....

dcl3500

put it on a couple of thin paperbacks

Volte

Ehhh.. don't do anything to the laptop itself. I was thinking maybe
fastening some rubber stoppers (you know those beaker-plugging
things) to a wooden frame the size of the laptop. So take a frame
of some kind, attach a stopper at each of the corners and set the
laptop on top of it.

Agent

Great idea. Only if I had thin books, haha. Great though, just great.

Banjo

While the OS software is pretty stable, poor device drivers can still take the system down. Have you installed any new devices just before the problem started?

You can see if this is the case by looking at the error message on the BSOD. If it is the same device causing the problem every time then its a good bet that its driver is the problem. You said that the machine auto-reboots when you get a BSOD. You need to turn this off to read the messages. Right-click on My Computer >> Properties >> Advanced Tab >> Startup and Recovery Button. Un-check the Automatically Reboot option.

Agent

I haven't put much on it but things for "writing" but here are some things I have put on there:

• Zonealarm trial version.
• USB to USB Link Networking cable.
• Visual Studio
• PC-Cillin
• Lots of downloads. Lots.

No hardware has been added. I bought this laptop a little after March 12.

Also, this just happened last night. It won't boot up. I can go in safe mode with networking though and backup my files. I've never had this much computer trouble.

Flyguy

It can be the virus scanner.
Is it a NT/2K/XP version?

I have had lot of problems with a virus scanner (norton) which came with my new motherboard.
I installed it only on my fresh system (Win2K) to see whether is was better than some other scanner I used. After installing Windows 2000 had to reboot and I never managed to get back in the desktop again (only in safe mode). Even when I tried to uninstall the norton scanner it caused my machine to stop responding.
At the end I had to reinstall Win2K

Agent

PC-Cillin is a Windows 2000 virus scanner. At least the one I have is, you can't install it on other systems. This laptop is a Win2k pc though. Right now I'm on the other computer. I might purchase Win XP. Though they try to put all these special graphics on it to slow it down. I, myself, don't care about that fancy stuff I don't know about yall. Anyways, I'm just happy I backed up my stuff.

Agent

UPDATE
There was something really wrong with the notebook. I'm returning it tommarow.