Why is my computer crashing

[Wish-I-Were-Fishn]

I have a nice, new home built computer. However, lately it has been crashing occasionally.

I don't have much installed by way of programs, but I did install an older HP 722c printer a while ago. It is supposed to use a serial cable, but my computer doesn't have a serial port so I got a serial-USB cable and installed the printer using the XP install a printer feature. It found and installed the driver for my printer.

When it crashes, I'm not using the printer, just surfing the net. I suddenly get the blue screen with lots of white text, but it goes so quickly that I can't read what it says.

Any ideas?

[MN Mike]

You are more likely to have a simple lockups from memory issues than BSOD.

I'll respectfuly disagree, more often than not, when I find the BSOD, it is a hardware failure, usually hard drive related but since it doesn't sound like WIWF has many " miles " on his computer yet, I doubt it would be the hard drive, that is why I would seriously look at ram first. I personaly don't put much weight in programs such as memtest and such, hardware failure whether it be a motherboard or ram often test ok, then break shortly after being tested.

Don't get me wrong, I too would rule out some software, even consider you might have gotten some poorly written Malware or Virus in your computer even IF you had protection.

Mike

[Whoaru99]

Getting it back to the point it ran OK can be a big question mark, that's the issue.

Agreed that uninstalling/undoing something that preceeded the problem is a reasonable approach. However, if it's a botched install, I have limited faith that standard uninstall porcedures removes the junk. However, I acknowledge it might. System restore to an earler point is another possibility.

I think it makes no sense to recommend toying around with msconfig before the basic hardware stuff like HDD and memtests are completed.

[Wish-I-Were-Fishn]

If I nuke the drive and start over, would that delete a virus (if I had one)?

[Sandmannd]

Depends on how deep the virus got. That's why I always right zeros to it when I'm cleaning a PC. Maxtor makes a good tool for that.

[upnorth]

Originally Posted By: upnorth

You are more likely to have a simple lockups from memory issues than BSOD.

I'll respectfuly disagree, more often than not, when I find the BSOD, it is a hardware failure, usually hard drive related but since it doesn't sound like WIWF has many " miles " on his computer yet, I doubt it would be the hard drive, that is why I would seriously look at ram first. I personaly don't put much weight in programs such as memtest and such, hardware failure whether it be a motherboard or ram often test ok, then break shortly after being tested.

Don't get me wrong, I too would rule out some software, even consider you might have gotten some poorly written Malware or Virus in your computer even IF you had protection.

Mike

That was what I said earlier. The BSOD is usually hardware/drivers/software related.

[Whoaru99]

If I nuke the drive and start over, would that delete a virus (if I had one)?

As far as I know it would. But, that's a lot of work for a first(?) step.

There are several on-line virus scanners if you don't trust your virus detection.

TrendMicro, BitDefender, Panda, Kaspersky, Norton, McAfee, F-Secure, et al.

Doesn't sound like a virus to me, but who knows?

Did you try the uninstalling and or restore recommendations and the Memtest and HDD tests?

[Surface Tension]

Formatting will knock all viruses out. I doubt its a virus though. The reason to format is to get rid all software that was installed. Software that could be causing the problem. I doubt though its a software problem but you have to start at the beginning and work your way up. Yes you'll need to troubleshoot this and you start from the beginning or else you'll be chasing your tail.

I could list off a load of reasons why your blue screening.

Heck do the mem test, as long as it isn't a windows based program.

As I said you have to double check your configuration of the motherboard. That is something you can't dust under the rug. Again knowing what your build specs will help tremendously for those trying to help you.

9 times out of 10 a BSOD is not a software problem. Its a hardware problem. More times then not it'll be the motherboard and then more specifically, a chipset, bridge, clocksettings, bios flash, ram, or ram configuration and so on. I won't speculate any longer till you list your build specs.

[PierBridge]

Quote:

Again knowing what your build specs will help tremendously for those trying to help you.

I thought I heard that earlier in the thread...

If these gurus can't get you going one of the best custom PC builders around lives near you in Burnsville. He's bailed me out numerous times over the years. He's more of hands on guy then a fix it over the phone/internet type of guy tho...

[LOTWSvirgin]

A few weeks ago my puter kept crashing to I just Reclained it. Its like reseting it back to factory settings

[Wish-I-Were-Fishn]

A few weeks ago my puter kept crashing to I just Reclained it. Its like reseting it back to factory settings

What is "reclained"? Never heard of that.

[upnorth]

Many PCs like Dell or HP and probably others have a feature to return them to the default settings. If you built your own it is probably not there. If it that bad you would be better off fdisk, format and reload Windows.

[Wish-I-Were-Fishn]

How do uninstall the printer? I want to try that first.

[Sandmannd]

Go to your control panel and open "printers". Find the printer you want removed, right click and delete it. Unless you have an uninstall option, then do the uninstall so it gets rid of the drivers.

[Whoaru99]

If you installed the printer using the printer's install disk, chances are there were a number of programs installed.

Might have to look at the list of programs in the Start>All Programs menu and or in the Add/Remove Programs (in Control Panel) to get it all uninstalled.

[Wish-I-Were-Fishn]

Nope, installed it using XP add a printer function. I unplugged the cable from the PC them deleted the printer from the list and rebooted.

I will be using it heavily during the next few hours to see what happens.

[Sandmannd]

Keep us posted.

[Wish-I-Were-Fishn]

I'm afraid to get to optimistic, but so far so good. I let it play several episodes of "24" and no crashes yet.

Time will tell.

[upnorth]

If that continues be sure to download the latest drivers for both the USB to Serial/parallel and printer drivers before you try again.

[rmk600]

Could it be something with HP? My wife’s niece has a HP photo printer with scan and fax. She said that one day the scanner quit working and she though that maybe she had a virus. So I took my laptop over there and told her that we would try that, hold and behold before I even got it all installed I got the blue screen of death on my laptop which has been pretty stable. I uninstalled the printer on my laptop and hasn’t acted up since. The niece has left the printer unplugged and has no more problems with her computer.

[crothmeier]

My parents had an HP printer that wreaked havok on their computer. they got rid of it, and bought a different brand and no problems since. I have an old Lexmark, and i pulled the files off the internet to run it and it seems to work just fine.

[upnorth]

Those all in one printer/scanner/fax devices are a plague. Better off getting each individual device if you really need all that. We have them here and they do cause some issues.

[Wish-I-Were-Fishn]

Still crashing, but this morning it gave me a different error report that pointed to the graphics card.

I have already instructed XP to update the driver, but it came back with no update found.

This time I went to the NVidea website and sure enough there was a new driver. I just installed it so I will now be running more tests to see if that was the issue.

If that doesn't work, I'm going to nuke the drive and start over.

[upnorth]

Hardware drivers can be a real pain in the rump.

[Sandmannd]

That they can. I work in the field, but I really hate computers. You're on the right path though. If that doesn't fix it, I would start from scratch.

[upnorth]

I think Surface Tension brought this up earlier, but I would go through all your device and update all the drivers.

[Wish-I-Were-Fishn]

I think Surface Tension brought this up earlier, but I would go through all your device and update all the drivers.

Yeah, thought I did that through XP, but I should the web also on my own.

[upnorth]

If you can find the manufacturers websites, you would be best downloading the latest drivers for the device there. Windows drivers have been known to cause problems. I have had a few laptops that we downloaded all the drivers from Microsoft and the keyboards or the mouse would quit working, so to the HP site we would go to get the right drivers.

[Wish-I-Were-Fishn]

I think Surface Tension brought this up earlier, but I would go through all your device and update all the drivers.

Is there a utility that will scan for all driver updates? I have updated the graphics card driver and checked the bios update, but there must be some that I'm missing.

[upnorth]

I am not convinced that windows drivers you get from Windows update are the best drivers for your hardware. Find out the manufacturer and go to their website and get the drivers there, you can't always trust windows to get you the best drivers. If you go into "Device Manager" it should tell you what the brand and model of the device is. Then google for the manufacturers website and find the latest driver for your device. I may even be a corrupt file that needs to be refreshed.

[Surface Tension]

Go to the motherboards site, find your model MB from there and download all the drivers. Save them on a partition other then C:.

Download you Sound Card drivers. Here we go again. Does you MB have onboard sound? Are you using a different sound card then the onboard sound. Did you disable the onboard sound?

Can you tell us what MB, hard drive, sound card, video, ram, and any other devices you have installed?

If we knew what your build is we could help.

Did you download and install USB 2 drivers?

Hard drive, is there any second party drivers that need to be installed before the XP install?

Are you using the correct ribbon cables?

Are you putting pci devices in the proper slots, meaning that and depending on your motherboard, some slots aren't to be used even though they are there. Some slots are not recommend for sound cards. What type video card to you have? AGP, PCI, PCIe?

Is there a new bios flash and what is it supposed to fix?

There are two ways to do that. A windows based with software installed and used though windows and then there is a Bios flash utility. Because your computer is more prone to crash in windows you should use the BIOS flash utility downloaded from the MB site. You should read up on how to do that and understand it well before trying to flash your bios. If you goof up thats it.

What are you doing when the computer crashes? If you can duplicate that then you might be able to nail down the cause.

Installing new drivers, first you'll want to uninstall the device. Reboot and when windows finds the device and wants to install it tell it not to. Then install the new driver and reboot again. When Windows wants to install let it. After the install look int he device manager and check on the driver making sure it took the new driver.

Back to Device Manager. Go there, are there any devices that show a problem?

This is just the tip of the what "could be" iceberg.

Like I mentioned a few times if we knew that your build was it would help tremendously. A quick search and I could find all know hardware problems with your MB. That would be compatibility issues with devices, BIOS flashes, System Setup Settings, and on and on.