Blue Screen of Death 2nd time in 3 months

[japide]

I purchased a laptop in late July 2005' Customer no cn/43497520, invoice no si/3071717, order no SO/2317813
Soon after I started to get error messages when trying to close down re not able to read certain memory addresses.
When I took the laptop back in December 2005 I was told in a jockular way "you'll have to reformat the hard drive HO HO "

So I did. It was an inconvenience.

In Sept 2006 I got the blue screen of death and after consulting this forum and the PC Advisor forum, I reformatted the drive again. Very inconvenient again, even more windows updates to download.

Last weekend, the Blue screen again. I have now got the message - the hdd has had it.

I will now instal a new hdd, but as I live in Spain this is quite expensive. I will be in the UK next week and wondered if the company would, without liability ans as a special case provide me with a neww HDD? I know its out of warranty, but I think a disc should last longer than 15 months.

In addition, I only have dial up in UK so an up tp date windows recovery disc would be very helpful.

Thanks in advance
japide

[Danno]

if the system has crashed 2 times in the last few months this could be nothing to worry about. all pc's new and old now will crash at one point. most of the time system crashes are software related rather than hardware. if there was a hardware fault the system would start crashing more and more.

you could try checking the hard drive for errors. if you see the guides section of the forum there is a post where you can download some software called powermax, you can use this to check the drive for errors. there is also a post for a program called memtest, you could try this as well.

[japide]

Thank you Danno
Perhaps I wasn't clear, sorry. The blue screen appears after I have got the Windows welcome screen. Then there is blackness for about 30 seconds then the fatal error message in whaite on a blue background.

So I cant download anything on the laptop, thank goodness my old desktop keeps working. In 5 years I have only had one HDD failure.

Are modern laptops so unreliable - I would have thought and hoped not.
Cheers

[Danno]

its possible for any computer to crash at one point. there are so many things that could cause a pc to crash, most of the time its software that causes the crashes.

[japide]

Yeah, thanks

However, whichever way you look at it, I'm still out of pocket in terms of time, effort, patience, confidence and of course cash.
One thing is for sure, I will think twice about who I buy my next computer from be it a laptop or desktop.

Do you think novatech would let me have an up to date windows XP home recovery disc? I will email and see what they say. Pray for a positive reply or even a reply.
Cheers

[djgandy]

Unfortunately, modern hard drives are what are un-reliable.

If it's BSODing after a clean format you can pretty much say you have a hardware issue.

BSOD doesn't really sound like a hard drive issue though. If data can't be read from the hard drive you usually get a lock up. Also the filesystem should mark off bad sectors.

BSOD's happen when something goes wrong within the o/s kernel, this could be caused by bad cpu ram or bus etc..

[japide]

Thanks for that

The BSOD message I get is

stop:c000021a {fatal system error} The session managerInitializationsystemprocess terminated unexpectedlywith a status of 0xc00026c (0x00000000 0x00000000)
The system had been shut down

Then the off oush works and the thing switches off.

Are you suggesting I reformat yet again?

PS what are all the things at the bottom of your post?
Cheers
J

[Nox]

at work, i would say a laptop HD, on average, lasts 12 months - some are fine for years, some are months... But our latest batch of laptops seem to be a lot better in that department, but have hmmm, less sturdy keyboards. /sigh.

BSOD are not common with windows XP, but certainly not unheard of - again, it depends on the machine, I have one here I have never seen BSOD, and its got to be getting on for 4+ years old, but again, its just as likely software as hardware and can be tough to diagnose.

Nox