Need help with computer booting

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hawkens982

My computer was working great until a couple of days ago, when it randomly got a BSOD while I was playing online.

Now the BSOD hasn't reappeared, but it now either restarts randomly, with no display on the monitor. Or it starts up into windows, after the splash screen, it beeps once and restarts and no more display on the monitor (power button goes orange).

I have removed the RAM and put it back in after blowing the dust off as well as AVG/Spybot -S&D scans. It works fine for a while, but then the problem comes back. How would I fix this problem?

Thanks.
 
Please report brand and model, and age of the equipment.
Is sounds as if you have an aging or otherwise defective hard drive... or a corrupt install of windows... or perhaps something as simple as a bad SATA or EIDE cable, or bad power supply.
 
One more thing

Those will help, raybay, but it would also help to know what version of Windows hawkens982 has. hawkens982: Post the things raybay asked for plus your version of Windows and what Service Pack. Put SP0 if you don't have a Service Pack.
 
* Intel Core 2.66GHz
* 4 GB Memory DDR2
* 250 GB Storage (SATA 7200 RPM)
* GeForce 8600
* Windows® XP Home
* SP3

I bought it from Cybertron Computers back in 2007/8, so it isn't that old.

If you need anymore info please just ask.

Thanks.
 
What should be simple isn't so simple... but if it is three years old, that is plenty of time for a hard drive or video graphics card to fail or give trouble.
Go to Start->Control Panel->System->Hardware->Device Manager to assure that there are no red, yellow, or grey flags by any devices. If the devices are OK, perhaps the next thing would be to run some scans: I recommend Microsoft Security Essentiasl (free download), SuperAntiSpyware (free), Malware Bytes (free), then either Avira Antivir, or Avast, or AVG downloads (free) to check for spyware or viruses... or rescan with what you have.
 
raybay said:
What should be simple isn't so simple... but if it is three years old, that is plenty of time for a hard drive or video graphics card to fail or give trouble.
Go to Start->Control Panel->System->Hardware->Device Manager to assure that there are no red, yellow, or grey flags by any devices. If the devices are OK, perhaps the next thing would be to run some scans: I recommend Microsoft Security Essentiasl (free download), SuperAntiSpyware (free), Malware Bytes (free), then either Avira Antivir, or Avast, or AVG downloads (free) to check for spyware or viruses... or rescan with what you have.
Click to expand...

I did what you told me above, theres no yellow/red /grey flags by any devices under Device Manager.

I also did a rescan with Spybot and AVG and nothing came up.
 
I suggest you still try SuperAntispy (free download) and MalwareBytes (free download).
Spybot is not in the same ballpark at all.
AVG, if the latest version is OK, but not the equal of Avira Antivir, Avast, Kaspersky or many other antivirus programs... if your system will load them.
Of course this will take time you may no have and I am sorry for that.
This will likely turn out to be something very simple, but there are many checks to make before we know what the simple fix is.
If you have an MDT, TriGem, Maxtor, Hitachi, or Samsung hard drive, the drive could be bad. If it is a Seagate, Western Digital, or Fujitsu, I would look elsewhere. But any hard drive can go bad at any time...
You could also have a good hard drive that has become corrupted or damaged, requiring a reinstall... but of course, you don't want to lose your data.
Were it mine, I would replace the drive to test, installing from scratch.
These "simple" problems can be so frustrating because it takes so many time-consuming checks and verfication to narrow it down to the one simple problem.
 
I'll grab Superantispy and Avast and scan my computer again.

As for the HDD, when I went under the device manager, it only says its a Standard Disk Drive under Manufacturer, where can I find out which brand I've got?
 
Doesn't the drive in question have a label on the front, or top, of it? That is required for public sale.
 
See if you can find the event viewer. Help for 'event viewer' on the start menu if you dont know where it is. Then look for splashy red x signs in the application and system message sets. What can you find that relates to hardware failure ? Often best to check just after you had to restart after the fault you describe.
 
Start->Help and Support->Index (in top bar)->Index on left access list->Event Viewing and Event Viewer are close together in that Index.
 
Sorry for the late reply.

I took a look at the event viewer, most of the errors under application are from Games for Windows Live and Java. However, under system, all of the errors are from acpi.

The log is as follows:

"AMLI: ACPI BIOS is attempting to create an illegal memory OpRegion, starting at address 0xffff0000, with a length of 0x10000. This region lies in the Operating system's protected memory address range (0x100000000 - 0x130000000). This could lead to system instability. Please contact your system vendor for technical assistance."

Not sure what that means.
 
Nor me, essentially, but MS pages about the particular error talk about bios errors, need for an updated bios etc.

Possibly, therefore, your bios has got corrupted, which can happen with a failing motherboard battery, usually after 6+ years, or a mains spike, or a malware attack, or a power short.

Instead of a bios corruption, I suppose it could be a corruption of a section of your system files on the HDD, caused by many of the same things as above, but also failing HDD.

Others may have other suggestions. Sorry this does not take you forward much. Could you look back through those system errors, as you usually have a month or more. What I would like to know is have you got a handful of those errors, or hundreds, and did they start around when your PC keeled over, or have they been continuous for the whole length of the event log?
 
two most frequent sources of this kind of error are
  1. memory
  2. hd failure
and memory would be the first thing to check.

get Memtest
  1. put it on a USB device
  2. boot into Safe Mode
  3. and run memtest for 3-4 passes
 
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