dell problems

u-9600 · 18 Aug 2012 at 16:01

So, my mums laptop(inspiron 1545) was dropped and the hard drive failed. I replaced the drive and installed a different version of windows vista to what it came with(no recovery CD and the recovery partition was on the dead HDD). However, the install was useless - random and repeated crashes, hangs etc. It would also not install any windows updates, got to configering updates stage 3 of 3 - 100% then hangs.

I then formatted the drive and then re-installed windows, however, the issues are still there...and i'm at a loss as to what else to try? Anyone got any ideas?

RAM problem?

thanks

Blackbadger · 18 Aug 2012 at 22:45

Try downloading the drivers from the dell website for the system (maybe on a different pc and copy across with a flash drive,

You can find them by entering the service tag from the bottom of the laptop on the support section of the dell website. Try installing these, it could be chipset/audio/video etc.. drivers causing the issue.

u-9600 · 19 Aug 2012 at 10:03

I've done that, and followed dells exact order for installing them. No difference...

firewallblocked · 19 Aug 2012 at 17:45

http://www.memtest.org/

Not having drivers installed shouldn't be causing crashes. Without video driver graphics will be poor and may not play HD video well etc. Is it just Internet Explorer that crashes? IE9 did have BIG problems with Vista on certain makes of laptops, had to uninstall it on a friends laptop. Old versions of flash player can also cause problems. Is this an OEM version of Vista or a pre activated version similar to a dell recovery cd. (i.e. Is there any pre installed software that's not present on a clean OEM or retail install of Vista.)

You can try Memtest86+ V4.20 from link above, you can burn an ISO image to cd or download a version to run from a usb drive. The ISO version is zipped so you may need winrar or similar to unzip the file.

You don't run it in windows, when i run the cd version i restart my pc and boot from cd and if you have burnt it to cd right it just starts testing your memory.

The blue images on the memtest website show how it looks when testing (even the latest version looks the same) all blue with white text. ANY RED text on the screen means memory problems, you don't need to understand what the numbers mean.

Run memtest for about an hour to be certain theres no problems.