Good evening,
Have been working on a Dell laptop that is approx 18 months old. The
neighbor tells me that they have been getting the blue screen of death. Also
she commented that the fan has been running at a much higher rate of speed
than normal (as she described it).

I have had success in booting up and putting it through it's paces. I even
returned it to them telling them that all was well. It ran great for 2 days
then the blue screen started to appear. I have tried to reinstall the OS
from the Dell cd's that came with the unit...but I can't get it to install.
I get an eror message that states that the installation cannot
continue...then I get a physical memnry dump, a reboot..and now an
unrecognizable boot sector message.

Any ideas? It would appear that there is a memory problem in an address
block that is missing or corrupt.

Help!

Kyle

See if you can obtain a Linux distribution that creates a bootable OS on the
CD: sorry I cannot remember the names of these distributions but there are
several downloadable from the internet.
If the computer will boot with the CD based OS and work stably that means
that it is likely the hard drive that has gone south, which I suspect is the
problem from what you describe anyway.
It costs vurtually nothing to try this out . . .

On Mon, 22 May 2006 02:36:54 +0000, km wrote:

If you've got another memory chip that's known to be good, swap it out for
the one in the laptop or, if there's two memory chips already installed,
yank one and see if you have any success, then try the other. You can try
MemTest86 for Windows ( http://www.memtest86.com/ ), which runs from a
floppy and works the memory chips looking for errors. I've had reasonable
success with this tool in similar situations. You can also download
diagnostic tools that run from a floppy or cd from the manufacturer of the
hard disk. It will tell you if there's any issues with the drive. Good
luck.

"bmoag" <aetoo@hotmail.com> wrote in
news:0rrcg.75589$_S7.27402@newssvr14.news.prodigy. com:

Here are a couple of live linux CDs-

http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php




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