My machine is now spontaneously BSODing with a frequency somewhat higher than I’d like. In fact, it’s safe to say that I’m rather nervous about leaving it on, or indeed starting it up. I thought earlier today I might get away with the whole ‘leave it until after my essays are submitted’ but it’s becoming rather rapidly apparent that that isn’t going to do. At all.
I will probably attempt to leave it, but by a process of using my laptop for work. Or something. I dunno. It’s three weeks. I can survive with reduced internet usage for three weeks can’t I?
It’d help if there was some actual obvious reason for the failures; I’ve just reverted to the ‘last known good configuration’ (whatever that was), but the reasons for the BSOD’s I’ve seen have been fairly varied – and then there’s the non BSOD-just stopped’s which are also pretty alarming. The whole thing just says ‘not good’ to me in big Pink Neon letters, flashing on and of with a disturbing frequency that makes me want to reinstall *now*.
If I didn’t have quite so much work on I would.
Didn’t you say something about a horrible noise coming from the box? And something about a fan?
Random lock-ups and BSODs would be consistent with the system overheating (especially lock-ups). Even on a broken Windows install, you usually only get one or two BSODs – if you frequently get lots of different ones, that’s probably something hardware related (not even drivers). Such as overheating. (Incompatible or failed memory is also a good one for random crashes and a wide spectrum of BSODs.)
Oh, and “Last Known Good” is basically a copy of the registry taken after the last successful login (i.e. after the desktop has appeared, which can be a life saver, but probably not very useful in your case).