Guys,
Foolishly volunteered to help a friend repair a laptop. It's her brother's machine. It's a Vaio. 1.8ghz celeron, 2gb ram, 250 gb hard drive, Vista Home Premium. Not sure on the model as it's at home, and I'm at work.
On boot, really, really, really sluggish, and kept bsod'ing. I tried running O&O defrag on it, which refused to run as it found a disc error. I ran chkdisc 3 times on full on find and repair mode: didn't find bad sectors, but O&O still refused to run. It's running rather hot around the vent, so I keep it on it's side, with the vent facing up to allow heat escape.
OK, thinks I, let's reinstall Vista and see what we get.
4 botched, BSODd installs while expanding files. Once it DOES install, 1 BSOD while creating profile. Another 4 BSODs while downloading updates.
Wow. OK.
I think it's either 1 overheating
2 bad ram
3 dodgy hard drive.
so I rotated the two ram modules, and tried running the machine with just one stick, then the other. No dice: still constant BSODs.
Overheating: i'm going to have the case off tonight to have alook at the fan.
Hard drive: I reckon it might be this.
The BSOD messages I got were memory_management a couple of times, and page_fault_in_non_paged_area, and IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
I didn't grab full screen prints. the bios is severely limited, so I can't alter anything in there. Are those 3 particular BSOD messages consistent with hard drive problems?