critical error

[ruth_2_hot]

  message keeps coming up on a blue screen and instantly shuts my lap top down , its not 12 months old yet , i have got zone alert on it to check for virus ets wondered if their is anything i can download to do a full check to see why its doing this , or am i better of taking it back to the shop ? cheers ruth 

[Tasha]

mine did the same and I've ended up having to get a new hard drive 

[Cob-Web]

This is a common error when a software rebuild is required, and that is the first thing OH recommends when any of our PC's start crashing like this - it is common known as the "Blue Screen of Death" in our house 

[kookie]

that happened on my pc at work, and when i reported it, they sent me a new one the next day. They called it the blue screen of death too.

[Cathy]

Take it back for sure whilst its still under warrenty.

Could be the motherboard. Could be loads of stuff, but if it is hardward, it can be costly.

[j-u-l-e-s]

Blue Screen of death is when you install some software or hardware that is not compatible with XP. Try to determine what new things you have installed to the computer BEFORE the Blue Screen of Death appeared. Go into safe mode and uninstall the culprit. To get into safe mode you
reboot the computer
press f8 while it is rebooting
and chose from the advanced menu safe mode
then go into control panel and uninstall the desired software.
 ;)I am guessing that it is windows XP you are running?. Also to save paying techie prices try using that technique. 

[SimonThePhotographer]

When you get a (worldly known) blue screen of death, it's usually directly related to a driver / kernel / memory issue.  You need to find out what it says on the blue screen, usually something like....  "caused exception in module BLAHBLAH.DLL" or something similar.  Some of the more common ones are Kernel32.dll, mup.sys and pretty much any dodgy driver you care to mention.

If you can be more specific about the type of failure, you may be able to fix it.  Note down what it says on screen (not including the hexadecimal numbers) and post back if poss.

[ruth_2_hot]

 :005:hiya simon cant post back to you what it says on the screen because it flashes up and closes down so fast that its gone before i can read it , its logging the fault on my pc so i could try and see if thats giving me any better idea of whats causing it , its been to pc world this weekend for a health check and they have taken my zone alert of and avg and to be honest its shutting down now on average 10 times a day , so i think im going to put them back on ,  luv ruth

[SimonThePhotographer]

The other thing i'd do, is boot up in Safe Mode and run the PC for a while.  If there are no crashes, at least you know it's a driver issue (usually just removing and reinstalling the offending shoddy bit of software will do the trick)