Inspiron 8200 with XP Professional crashes all the time

[Zach]

My Professional XP laptop seems to have a problem
handling such tasks as running an average program or
installing a new program on the harddrive. It shuts down
without any message. I checked off "Automatically
restart" checkbox in Startup and Recovery\System failure
tab to no avail. No messages/warnings are issued. The
only indication that tells me that the system will go
down is the noise (from the harddrive or CPU fan(?)) that
rapidly increases 2-5 seconds before the laptop (Inspiron
8200 with 25 GB of free space) goes down... Not sure if
this is a hardware problem or OS...
Regards,
Zach

 

[Shenan T. Stanley]

My Professional XP laptop seems to have a problem
handling such tasks as running an average program or
installing a new program on the harddrive. It shuts down
without any message. I checked off "Automatically
restart" checkbox in Startup and Recovery\System failure
tab to no avail. No messages/warnings are issued. The
only indication that tells me that the system will go
down is the noise (from the harddrive or CPU fan(?)) that
rapidly increases 2-5 seconds before the laptop (Inspiron
8200 with 25 GB of free space) goes down... Not sure if
this is a hardware problem or OS...

If it is still under warranty - you should call Dell. To me it sounds like
a heat problem, but they would be able to walk you through the
troubleshooting steps necessary for them to fix/replace it.

 

[Quaoar]

If it is still under warranty - you should call Dell. To me it
sounds like a heat problem, but they would be able to walk you
through the troubleshooting steps necessary for them to fix/replace
it.

For my money, this is very likely CPU overheating, and should not be
happening on a new laptop. Before sending to Dell, look for a BIOS
revision at Dell.

Q