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Computer Crashed 3X This Morning

  • Thread starter jimscott
  • Start date

jimscott

Tropical Fish Enthusiast
I logged onto the computer this morning and shortly thereafter the computer crashed. There was a long message on the screen that was up there for only a few seconds, before shutting down. It said something about, "if this is the first time..." and something about hardware. That's about all I could read before it went away. So I restarted and several minutes later the computer crashed again. So I reatarted again and the same thing happened a thrid time. I restarted once more and ran a virus scan - nothing. It looked like it was going to crash yet again but didn't. Any ideas?
 
Yes. oddly enough, it isn't doing that today. We haven't installed any new hardware, recently. What's going on?
 
How old is your computer? What version of Windows does it have? When was the last time the OS was reinstalled?
 
The first time you get that message is usually because something got corrupted in memory. This doesn't necessarily mean that the RAM is going bad. One part of memory had gotten overwritten when it shouldn't have for various reasons. The second and third times it occurred is probably some data cached to disc was corrupted from the previous crash. If it continues, probably run one of the OS repair procedures dependent upon what version of Windows you have. If it's working now then it is probably ok. You can always run the system file checker in XP to look for corruption.
 
Any ideas?

PC crashes can be caused by many different reasons.

If the crash occurs always with the same error message: Write down the error message and google for it!

If that is not the case and the problem occurs only during graphically demanding operations of the PC like playing action games, video playback or browsing flash animated websites, check the graphics driver of the PC graphics card, if you have the latest version of the driver. If not, install the latest driver for the graphics card.

If it is always changing error messages (or crash with no message at all) and the graphic card driver seems to be OK, the next thing I check is the RAM modules. For that I burn a booting CD with a very small memory test program which starts after booting. Do you know how to burn an ISO image file to CD? You can download RAM module test software here:
http://www.memtest.org/#downiso
The software needs the first 0.064 MB of the RAM modules to be OK (otherwise the software test is not possible), but if you have 2048 MB of RAM installed, you can easily test the remaining 2047.936 MB if they work OK. Let the test run for half an hour to one hour or so, if the error count stays at "0", the memory modules should be OK.

Crashes can also occur with a faulty power supply: Either your mains power line from the generating station has problems, or the power supply of the PC has become faulty. If the voltage problem is from the generating station, it should be gone after some hours. If it is from the power supply of the PC, things will get worse after time.

It can be very hard to find out what causes the crashes, if the crash does not happen always with the same error message but there is either no error message or the messages are different from crashing to crashing. Except it is the RAM module, but that can easily be tested (see above).
 
Computer tech here. Hard drive going bad, or too much dust buildup on the video card or cpu are the most likely. Or a dozen other things. I would bring it into your local pc repair shop.
 
Lotsa good potential reasons. I can't pinpoint it right now. The computer about a year old and I have Vista. For the moment, it stopped crashing. I'll look into NAN's suggestions, as well as dust and power supply. Thanks for the responses.
 
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