Im a little confused on a problem with an Advent lappy my sister asked me to have a look at.

It has Windows XP and the lassy that owns it says nothing new was installed, software or hardware.

Basically it begins to load up, but at one point, in any safe mode option it will just freeze and for not even a second a BSOD comes on the screen.

Its so fast its difficult to see, never mind any codes.

I was thinking getting a 2nd hard drive for the computer and installing Win XP on that and then see if there was a problem that way?

Although what other ways could I try?

Oh it gets to the "AGP440" bit of booting up and then crashes, so it might crashing on whats after that or on the AGP bit.

mm, unless theres important stuff on there id just format it and see if that fixes it...

if there is important stuff on it ive got a lappy HD to USB convertor around here somewhere.... you could borrow that to back everything up first ?
(thats what Ive always done in the past!)

Control Panel > System > Advanced > Startup and Recovery Settings > Disable automatically restart setting.

Quote from: funkychicken9000Control Panel > System > Advanced > Startup and Recovery Settings > Disable automatically restart setting.

It wont load up to windows in any mode at all, got another windows disc and might try sfc from command prompt.

if the XP install doesnt solve it theres two things id check,

the ram with memtest86+ http://www.memtest.org/,
caused my home pc to refuse to complete an XP install

other thing would be open it up and see if any of the caps have blown,
blown caps on the voltage regulation rails on a desktop pc at work caused it to hang randomly, usually when the cpu was stressed and drawing max volts (windows boot up), swapped them and its been fine since

could be the same thing on the lappy although ive no idea how youd go about fixing them or if its possible to see them blown.

AGP440 - not sure if im right but it reminds me of AMDs agp chipset drivers

not that it helps much at this stage,
btw the easiest thing to do is boot from an xp CD and install it without formating if there is room to do so.

saves the hassle of swapping disks out

Quote from: madmaxbtw the easiest thing to do is boot from an xp CD and install it without formating if there is room to do so.

saves the hassle of swapping disks out

Ahh! yeah I could just do that and have a dual boot...

Twas a Hard drive problem, tried to install Windows from my disk and it said the drive was empty.