> ... 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.

  I'll hazard an educated guess that this is the monitor's "I'm not getting
a video signal" message, between when the PC dies and when the reboot
starts.  It *could* be a BSOD (blue screen of death) error report, but those
then to also halt the processor so you get a chance to read the message.

David Gillett



On 18 Jul 2004 at 16:59, Steve Brumbaugh 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.
>
> I'm running WinXP, a new WD hard drive, AMD processor, and an Elitegroup
> KT600-A motherboard, all of which I got at Fry's separately, so I can't just
> return the system.
>
> I'm guessing there's some conflict, but what?  Does anybody have any idea
> about this problem?  Or what to check?  Or even just to be able to slow down
> that blue screen so I can at least find out what it says?
>
> Thanks,
> Steve B.
>
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