At 04:59 PM 7/18/2004 -0700, you wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I'm still working on the new system I'm putting together and I've run into
>another problem.  Everything seems to be fine and then suddenly the screen
>flashes with a blue screen showing white letters, but this goes by so fast I
>can't begin to guess what it says.  The system then restarts and goes into
>the "didn't shut down correctly, do you want to use safe mode, etc"
>situation.  If I go back to normal startup, it often then will not even get
>WinXP completely started, but blue screen and back to restarting.  Safe
>mode, the same thing happens.
>
>Sometimes it seems to restart correctly, goes into Windows and then a couple
>of minutes later, the same thing happens.  On one of the "successful"
>restarts, I left the system on for 40 hours without messing with it to see
>what would happen.  It apparently did just fine.  I then tried to install
>some of the software and about 1/2 hour later it happened again!  Not
>surprising (since I didn't fix anything), but frustrating!
>
>As I said above safe mode didn't accomplish anything.  In the BIOS, I tried
>both fail-safe defaults and optimized defaults, but didn't see any change in
>behavior.

What you are getting is a system error and the infamous Blue Screen of
Death (or BSoD), but then it is rebooting too fast to see what the message
is. These types of errors usually indicate hardware or device driver
incompatibilities. However, it could also be caused by bad or incorrect
memory (memory too slow for the CPU or running it too fast), or an
overheating processor. Check the requirements for the memory and make sure
it is applicable for the motherboard/CPU combo. Also monitor the CPU temps
and see if it is overheating. AMD processors don't throttle back when they
get hot like the Intel's do.

You should be able to set it to not reboot automatically, so you can see
the error messge, which might help diagnose the problem. I have Win 2000,
so XP may be slightly different. Go to "My Computer -> Control Panel ->
System -> Advanced -> Startup and Recovery". Uncheck the "Automatically
Reboot" box. Next time it crashes, the blue screen should stay up and allow
you to see the stop code.


Russ Poffenberger
Credence Systems Corp.
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