Unusual Blue Screen of Death Problems

[Jocky Wilson]

My folks have a PC that gets used pretty much every day and works fine without a problem. However, about twice a year they will go away for a month or more to visit relatives overseas, so the computer has a period of time without being used.

Everytime they come back from an extended trip away, their Windows XP PC will Blue Screen all most immediately they turn it on. It takes several hours of rebooting the box before it will even finish loading the OS - but even then it will blue screen after a few minutes of use.

Over a few weeks of rebooting, the PC will slowly stay up longer before blue screening - until it eventually stops crashing and works reliably again.

This pattern repeats itself each time the computer has more than a few days without being turned on. And I have no idea why!!! - (other than it has to be hardware related)

The Blue Screen is just a page-fault error and it dumps physical memory to a file.

I'm an IT professional and consider myself pretty good with PC's. I've build my own PC and diagnosed hardware issues before, but this has me completely stumped.

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions?

[mjc]

Start with the CMOS battery...replace it.

[Jocky Wilson]

Thanks mjc.

I already think that you may have cracked it.

After reading your reply it seemed logical to get my folks to leave their PC on all night even if it was in a blue screen state - just so as to charge up the CMOS battery. So far since then they've had no more blue screens.

So when I see them in a couple of weeks I'll get the CMOS battery swapped out. Presumably I need to record as many BIOS settings as possible before I perform the swap as removing the CMOS will cause the BIOS to reset to defaults?

Thanks,

JW

[Fruss Tray Ted]

Quickest way I have found to write down what the BIOS settings are is with one finger!

On the shutter button of my digital camera! :p