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    Hardware malfunction on a 3 year old Inspiron 6400? Help!

    Discussion in 'Dell' started by The Streets, Feb 14, 2010.

  1. The Streets

    The Streets Notebook Consultant

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    Specs: Vista Home Premium 32, 2Ghz Core 2 Duo CPU, 2GB DDR2 RAM, 5400rpm SATA hard drive, ATI Mobility X1400 GPU

    Okay, here is the sequence of events:

    October: I bought Windows 7 HP and clean installed it by booting the 64 bit disk from the BIOS

    January (start): After 3 years of near faultless use, I sold it to a friend (and upgraded to the machine in my sig). Before I gave it to him, I clean installed Win 7 HP 64 again, this time from within the OS

    January (end): Friend is having trouble syncing his iPod Touch with my old machine. Culprit seems to be Win 7 64 incompatability

    February: I clean install the Win 7 HP 32 disk, from within the 64bit OS.

    Present: So here's where we are; he's getting regular "Hardware Malfunction" blue screens. Also, the computer keeps freezing randomly, even when performing low intensity tasks, ie. browsing Facebook.

    Any ideas what's causing this? I never had these problems when I owned the machine, and all of a sudden it's gone screwy since I gave it to him?!?!
     
    The Streets, Feb 14, 2010
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  2. WildmanCAL

    WildmanCAL Notebook Consultant

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    Usually the BSOD will have some sort of error message which can lead you to the problem.

    Try this:

    Go to CONTROL PANEL and choose SYSTEM.
    Click on ADVANCED SYSTEM SETTINGS and under "Startup and Recovery" choose SETTINGS.
    Uncheck AUTOMATICALLY RESTART under the "System Failure" section.
    Click OK and then OK again.

    This will help when a BSOD happens but leaving the error on screen and not restarting the computer. From there, you can hopefully get an error message to search on Bing or Google.

    I hope this can help you pinpoint the problem. Good luck!
     
    WildmanCAL, Feb 14, 2010
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