Blue screen of Death

so...it was running ok for a few hours, now i got 2 more crashes. The last Blue Screen Of Death very clearly read the "Memory management" error message. When I shut down and turned the puter on, I got the "Windows has recovered from a serious error" and then it listed 3 things.
1) The first one said something to the effect that I may have been running too many programs that are labor intensive, like virus scanner or defragmenting (I have been, in fact, running both and that after not shutting the computer down for a few days)
2) The second one said something about Firefox
3) Third one said something about Java, also related to Firefox.

I shut down, unplugged the power cord, took out the battery, held the power button down for some 20 seconds to clear any residues and whatnot (been told to do that by customer service once before when i had memory issues).... but I got the same blue screen again shortly after restarting. I am uninstalling programs I never use (games the computer came with, files i don't need,etc...) but I'm pretty sure that's not the problem. I have well over 30GB of space on my hard drive.

No time to bring it to the Geek Squad before I move across The Puddle... anything I can do from home?

People, she's been sharpening pencils. She needs help.

Hey Dasha, would you like to use my computer until yours is fixed?

you know i'm OCD...i won't rest until it's fixed. and i will want to fix it myself if i can....but if i must surrender it to the geek squad for a day or two, i can borrow a desktop from work. you need your puter, too. at least i don't have to write

he, 'tis true i've been sharpening pencils. i've been actually reading BOOKS while the puter does things.

It is a pretty good excuse, indeed.

The problem is that it can be an awful lot of different things. It can be a bad program (not necessarily malware but just leaking memory for some reason). It can be a bad driver (I've heard of this happening with bad graphics card or sound card drivers) and it can even be a hardware problem (bad RAM etc).

But beyond all that anyone who can try to help you remotely doesn't have a lot to go off of, and it may end up being more of a pain for both you and them to try to work it out remotely.

But with all that in mind, here are a few ideas:

1) Disable Aero. Aero is the eye candy and graphics in the Windows UI, but it requires a decent graphics card or enough memory. 1GB is not usually enough to run it comfortably. Learn how to disable it here:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/disable-aero-on-windows-vista/

2) Update your device drivers. Go to Control Panel > Device Manager and then try this:

a) Right-click your "computer" on the Device Manager and "scan for hardware changes".

b) Go to some of the bigger parts of your computer like the graphics card, etc and see if you can get updated drivers.

3) Try some memory tweaks. If you want to be brave, you can try some of these memory tweaks for vista:

http://www.techspot.com/guides/72-windows-vista-memory-tweaking/page1.html

Thanks! Aero successfully disabled... Now I'm working on the driver updates...so far everything is up to date.

It was mentioning Java...and I know the latest Java updates messed up my Dreamweaver at work... so I'm gonna blame them. I might be totally wrong...but I'll feel better having a scape goat.

How have the last 25 minutes been?

smooth sailing so far.... the Blue Screen of Death comes unannounced.... I remember to save things often.

Good thinking!

Also, I'm now on IE instead of firefox...just in case. 2 out of the 3 Big Error Messages concerned firefox, so i'm agonna ignore it for awhile.

Well, I'm going to bed. If you want to use the acer, feel free. Just use openoffice and save it as a word document.

thanks... i'll sleep too. the chapter is doomed. doomed!

...one thing i noticed is that my hard drive is VERY busy.... its thiking light keeps flickering, and things are slow....it's definitely engaged in some Deep Thought...but it's not sharing what about.

This probably (I emphasize probably) indicates too little RAM. The laptop is swapping RAM back and forth to disk.

Get a memory upgrade if you can afford it. (And make sure you get exactly the right kind of memory.) Crucial.com can help you select the right stuff.

Is your document very large?

If you're feeling Really Ambitious, you can run the performance/resource monitor tool.

Start->Run->perfmon.

Try Pages/sec, Avg. Disk-queue length, and %processor time.

Finally, if you are Really, REALLY Ambitious, I had this note a week or so ago from one of my co-workers:

I have a suspicion (no more than that) that windows update is trying to apply German updates to your (probable English US) installation.

Similar posts on the web refer to US or EN updates!
I have no idea why this could be happening, but the 'de-DE' codes in your error message certainly look like German sources!

nope, i had bad segments of the hard drive... the computer is being fixed/replaced as we speak. I hope replaced, that would mean an upgrade to a newer model, too.

thanks for looking though! i am sure i'll be back with other problems.

CHECK the Metaphysical warranty on any gift horse dagaraka & LOL with me