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?

[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 HSOforum 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 HSOforum 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 HSOforum 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.

[Sandmannd]

I agree with Upnorth and Surface. Put the drivers on another partition and also burn them on a CD so you always have them in case a hard drive fails.

[bobbymalone]

why has no one suggested this is a windows registry error? i think most bsod errors are due to problem with the registry. there are programs that can fix errors in the registry, but some of them seem like scams so I am not gonna recommend one for you.

when you say it has been crashing lately, you mean that it worked fine for how long before it started crashing? if it worked fine for a month you can pretty much rule out hardware incompatibility. it's a software issue and IMHO it's the registry.

[Wish-I-Were-Fishn]

Still having issues. Were should I bring it (South metro) to have it fixed?

Don't trust the geek squad.