Dell 1537 and blue screen problems

My wife picked up a Dell 1537 and has been experiencing blue screen issues. It only happens when the computer is turned on or restarted.

I have checked the event viewer and there is nothing that looks suspicious or outside the norm. I made sure that drivers were updated. I tried running Memtest86 but it closes and starts to load Windows after running for 10 seconds.

Any suggestions before I take it back?

 

Boot it in Safe Mode and see if you get the problem. Also, the Event Viewer is only good if you know What to look at. For a summary, when the EV opens up, click on the top where it says Event Viewer (Local), and this will give you a summary of pertinent errors/failures/events. For specifics, look in all the Windows Logs folder logs, Admin in Custom Events, Hardware Events in Applications and Services. Make sure you open the folder out and click on Operational.

Also, the Reliability Monitor will show you Application and Hardware crashes. For your particular problem this is the most likely place to look for the problem.

1. Control Panel, Performance Information, Advanced Tools.
2. Note - any problems will be shown at the top with a yellow exclamation icon. Also, if you go to the bottom and click on the Health Report link, it will run a system diagnostic, the results of which can be viewed in the RP Monitor in the next step.
3. Click on Reliability and Performance Monitor.
4. Click on Reliability Monitor on the left side to open the System Stability Report with RM graphs

The graph is a visual representation of any failures, hardware or software. A red circle with white X indicates a failure. Click on it and it will show you what the process is that's responsible.

The Report data from the Health Diagnostic is available if you click on the Reports folder on the left side, then go down to System Diagnostic. The report is labeled with the date of the report and its sequence number. For example, 20090408-0006 is a report generated on April 8, 2009, and is the 6th diagnostic run so far.

You should be able to narrow it down from there. Also, concerning the Event Logs, you can setup the EV to log a specific event.

 

If you're using memtest86 try the multi-cpu option (I can't recall the exact name, but it says it's experimental). Alternatively, you can try memtest86+. Memtest86 (v3.5) in single cpu mode does the same thing for me. It's an issue with the way memtest86 handles multi-core cpus.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memtest86+

 

You say, before you "take it back"... that makes me wonder, is this a Studio 15 purchased from Best Buy? If so, you need to upgrade the webcam driver *before* you apply the Windows updates. This is a known issue with a conflict between the shipping version of the webcam driver and a specific Windows update.

See this link from BBY's site for more information:
http://www.forums.bestbuy.com/bb/board/message?board.id=Computers_New&thread.id=3137

If your system isnt from BBY, well, you can still attempt the above but no promises that it will do any good

Best of luck...
--Eric