Vista - General Instability and Crashes

[NathanH]

Hi, I've been experiencing problems with my laptop for the past week and a
half. It's an Asus F3SC-AP113C (Intel C2D T7100, 160GB HD, 2GB RAM, nVidia
GeForce 8400M G graphics card) running pre-installed Vista Home Premium. I've
only had it for a couple of months.

It literally worked fine one night before shutting down, and then began
faulting the following day (from Tues 13th Nov. onwards). I suspect that the
laptop may have auto-installed Windows Updates while shutting down the night
before. When I logged in on Normal Mode it would freeze after a few seconds
and I'd get a blue screen - this happened several times. I tried system
restore and from then on it would still freeze after a few minutes, but
without a blue screen.

Since then I've been working in 'Safe Mode with networking', as I am now.
This is the current situation:

-Normal Mode still crashes very easily after a couple of minutes of login,
triggered by anything as simple as opening a Windows Explorer window or
opening the Start Menu; it's different every time. When it freezes, neither
CTRL-ALT-DEL or SHIFT-CTRL-ESC work so I have to reboot.

-Windows Sidebar has failed to load since the crashes began. I tried running
a full scan with Windows Defender and whenever it reached 'sidebar.exe' it
triggered a crash

-Even safe mode can be unstable at times but only on rare occasions,
including a blue screen a few days ago.

-Multiple attempts at System Restore and chkdsk have so far not helped

-Event Viewer has logged over 2,000 errors in the past 7 days - I checked
this a couple of days ago and it was only around 1,200! Events which seemed
only to have produced many errors SINCE the crashes started include: SRTSP,
DistributedCOM, iaStor and LoadPerf (the latter for the past week only)

-The last blue screen was a couple of days ago, which I managed to take a
note of: ***STOP 0x00008086 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000000 if
I'm not mistaken

-One thing that's really worrying me is a very faint clicking sound coming
from the laptop every few minutes or so, which I hadn't noticed before the
troubles started. I really don't know if I'm being paranoid here or if it
could be serious - after searching Google for solutions I found this may be
the first sign of a hard drive failure!

That's the situation. Sorry for the very long intro!

 

[Chuck]

There is a good possibility that you have hardware failure. I'd pull off to
externam storage any documents that you must keep, and anything else that
you can.

 

[NathanH]

Okay - I've got space left on an external drive, I can put essential
documents on there. Although starting again from scratch will be a
nuisance.

The question now is what to do to try and solve the fault. Is this something
my warranty should cover? Do I risk invalidating it if I seek help
elsewhere? Can I even be sure that this is a hardware (not software)
issue, and should I get this checked before doing anything else?

 

[Bob J]

It appears as you say that an update may have been the original cause of your
problem. If you can not restore to a point when the PC was stable and
considering what you may have done to rectify the problem, unfortunately it
maybe time to bite the bullet and do one of three things>
1. Attempt a complete re-installation of the OS, using what ever
installation media you have, if you can possibly backup your data, good.
2. Return to manufacturers for repairs, the only thing is that if it was a
upgrade that caused the problem, they will wash their hands of it.
3. Take to a reputable repairer for repairs.
To give a answer to what is wrong a lot more info needs to be provided.
With the diagnostic tools available someone sitting in front of the machine
may have a better chance.
I you have the knowledge you can just keep trying to repair yourself.
--
Regards
Bob J
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