Crashing Laptop

PiKe · 2 Sep 2009 at 10:46

A laptop has suddenly started crashing on booting into windows, it's so bad that it's actually freezing up in the bios, there are no thermistors so there's no temperature readings for anything other than the hard drive, I've cleaned a little bit of fluff out but I can't see that making any difference (which it hasn't).

Anyone got any suggestions?

alex24 · 2 Sep 2009 at 10:54

If there are two sticks of RAM in there, try taking each one out in turn.

PiKe · 2 Sep 2009 at 10:55

Just the 1 unfortunately and none that I can borrow.

Coldzero · 2 Sep 2009 at 10:58

Can you boot from a disk?

PiKe · 2 Sep 2009 at 11:00

Coldzero said:
Can you boot from a disk?

It's crashing in the bios.

SfnX · 2 Sep 2009 at 11:01

very strange, i doubt its temperature problems when ur booting. if u can get hand of another laptop use the harddrive on that to make sure u can still boot, check the ram, use another set of ram to single out that its not the problem. if the problem persists then just use each bit of hardware to see what is making the issue.

i rabble on a lot

PiKe · 2 Sep 2009 at 11:06

Tried removing hard drive, but after a few seconds in bios it crashes with screen corruption.

It's dead dave.

Coldzero · 2 Sep 2009 at 11:11

Tried clearing the cmos?

PiKe · 2 Sep 2009 at 11:12

Reset settings to default before it crashed on me yes, no change.

Could quite possibly be a bad cap somewhere.

alex24 · 2 Sep 2009 at 12:34

Bad RAM can cause crashes/hanging/corruption in the BIOS. I recommend at least borrowing or sourcing a cheap stick from somewhere before you write it off.