anyone...?
Laptop crashed a few times & now isnt working...
Hi. I've been using my Dell laptop for around 3 years. It's a Latitude D820 running XP SP2.
In the last couple of days the laptops crashed when I've been gaming. The first time it crashed everything was running fine and I had a random blue screen and error message that said something like "hardware malfuction (not these words though). Please contact manufacturer for support". During the crash a texture from the game would cover the entire screen and the mouse arrow would stop working. Ctrl Alt Del wouldnt work, and then the caps lock key wouldnt work either. It did this a couple of times, and after I booted it up after 2 times lines appeared on the Dell logo as I booted the machine up, and then some on the Windows XP logo. Yesterday it did this and continued to Windows absolutely fine, but after 10mins the screen started flashing on and off around 5 times before going completely blank, and when it flashed off after these 5 times Caps Lock didnt work at all and I closed the machine down manually. When it flashed on the screen had lots of rows of lineson it, in groups of 4.
It now doesnt load up Windows. I get a disk partitian window (as usual... I never let it perform now as it deletes my firefox bookmarks). And when I cancel this it seems like Windows is about to start up and it the screen just goes blank.After this Caps Lock doesnt work. I also noticed the last few times some of the letters on startup are not correct. Please see the image bellow for a picture of this.
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I'm running all of the default components taht came with the laptop, including the 100GB 7200RPM HDD and 2GB of ram. The laptop often heated up quite a lot, but I've seen laptops go hotter and still not overheat.
I've read a few places that its probably the RAM, but the 'wrong letters' thing seems weird, as well as the flashing of the screen. Could any of you guys help at all?
In the last couple of days the laptops crashed when I've been gaming. The first time it crashed everything was running fine and I had a random blue screen and error message that said something like "hardware malfuction (not these words though). Please contact manufacturer for support". During the crash a texture from the game would cover the entire screen and the mouse arrow would stop working. Ctrl Alt Del wouldnt work, and then the caps lock key wouldnt work either. It did this a couple of times, and after I booted it up after 2 times lines appeared on the Dell logo as I booted the machine up, and then some on the Windows XP logo. Yesterday it did this and continued to Windows absolutely fine, but after 10mins the screen started flashing on and off around 5 times before going completely blank, and when it flashed off after these 5 times Caps Lock didnt work at all and I closed the machine down manually. When it flashed on the screen had lots of rows of lineson it, in groups of 4.
It now doesnt load up Windows. I get a disk partitian window (as usual... I never let it perform now as it deletes my firefox bookmarks). And when I cancel this it seems like Windows is about to start up and it the screen just goes blank.After this Caps Lock doesnt work. I also noticed the last few times some of the letters on startup are not correct. Please see the image bellow for a picture of this.
I'm running all of the default components taht came with the laptop, including the 100GB 7200RPM HDD and 2GB of ram. The laptop often heated up quite a lot, but I've seen laptops go hotter and still not overheat.
I've read a few places that its probably the RAM, but the 'wrong letters' thing seems weird, as well as the flashing of the screen. Could any of you guys help at all?
