BSOD help please

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?

Have you give it a blow out with some air duster? All the Z series we had at work seemed to be dust magnets and where prone to fan failures

I blew into the fan, and got a facefull of dust. I've not got anything higher powered than my own lungs, so when I get the case off tonight, I'll have a look.

What type of error message is it? might be helpful if you can jott it down as some are CPU or whatever based.

Overheating or hard drive would be my bet aswell. I'd most likely reset bios clutching at straws aswell.

Got the back off. would you believe it, a Vaio that's got an easy to remove outer case! Whatever next....
Anyway, the vent fan's not working. At all. So I think I've got my culprit.
Right, let's see if I can get a replacement.
Oh, and the heat pipe is "conducting2 from the CPU with some god awful pad of what looks like asbestos or something. May have to replace that with some arctic paste.

Hmmmm.... OK, stumped again.

The asbestos thing is on the north or southbridge. the CPR does have paste on it.

So... as te fan is kaput, I have told the guy to buy a new one, and given him a link. So I got my large house fan, put it on max blowing, and, putting the laptop up so that it was resting on one edge of the keyboard and screen, with it's naked back facing outwards, and the air vent facing upwards, I pointed my room fan at the naked back to cool the components.

STILL got BSOD.

DAmmit.

I've just run a full format and scan on the HDD by hooking it up to my windows 7 rig. No problems there. Will try a reinstall again tomorrow.

In the meantime, the BSOD says:

"A problem has been detected, if this is the first time, yada, yada,", no memory_management or any of those types of warnings, but at the bottom it says:

"Stop: 0x00000024 (0x001904aa 0x8bb24924 0x8bb24620 0x8944ce69)"

I've looked that up: general corruption, I think. That makes me think hard drive was problematic, and/ or overheating again. I'm steering away from ram probs at the moment.

Help? PLease?

I would replace the fan and see what happens. The internal components might not be getting cooled by your house fan, and he needs to replace it anyway.

Sadly at this time it's sort of trial and error, and I'm guessing it's out of warranty..

Certainly is after he opened it anyway lol, use hiren's boot cd and run hdd regenerator to check the hard drive for bad sectors and mem test for ram errors.

It was the ram.
Swapped it with my laptop sticks, and got faultless install and updates, no BSOD. My machine, on the other hand, BSODed. So there we go.
Thanks all.