Frequent blue screen of death problems please advise

[Jim]

Group,

I reformatted my drives this weekend, and I went to
install a legal copy of XP. However, set up would stall
and throw out the blue screen of death with a page fault
error. Consequently I had to throw on Windows 2000
Professional and the installation went OK. Now, however,
I receive numerous errors ranging from page faults to
DRIVER_IRQL_LESS_OR_EQUAL errors. In a couple of
occasions the machine gave, which looked to me like, a
memory address and said something about the ntoskrnl file
was corrupt or missing. After a complete shutdown I was
able to continue normally. Lastly, just out of nowhere
some of my applications will throw out an error that says
that there was an error and a specific memory address and
asks me if I want to debug. I also find these errors to
be more frequent when I am doing something with a heavy
load like installing programs or large copy and paste
events

My question is, is this a sign of a component going out
like a hard drive or some other motherboard problem?
Before reformatting the drive I had Windows XP on the
machine and it was very stable.

I'm sorry for the vagueness, but I am pretty frustrated
with it.

Any suggestions would be great,
Jim

 

[Dan Seur]

Jim - it does sound like a hardware prob. You might:
1. Make sure all connections are tight.
2. Make sure all cards incl RAM are tightly seated.
3. Download/run the drive manufacturer's diagnostic, usually a bootable
diskette image; it will check the hardware for problems, sometimes can
fix some, and depending on results the tech support guys may give you a
free replacement drive.
4. Make sure all drivers (mobo and devices) are W2k-specific; on XP make
sure they're XP-specific.
Just in case:
5. Run System File Checker (sfc.exe). For syntax do: C:>sfc /?
6. You backed up your important stuff lately?

 

[Dan Seur]

Jim - I should have also said:
Check Event Viewer and Device Manager for clues.