BSOD problems on a Dell Laptop

[QueBert]

This is a weird problem, my dad's Dell Laptop is Blue Screening bad, he's claiming when it's booting it will BSOD every time unless he presses a key when XP is loading. He's a MS certified Teacher, not saying that makes him uber smart but I can't understand what he's talking about the pressing any key right before XP opens. I told him to send me a minidump so I can look, there is only 1 and it's old. Every time XP BSOD it's supposed to write a minidump. He's definitely getting them as he was reading some off to me, various but there's a lot.

any idea why it woldn't be writing the minidumps? Most of his MS training has seemed to go down the drain from lack of hands on, he teaches Outlook classes to City Employees which can't be too taxing.

I'm still confused about how pressing any key when XP comes up keeps it from crashing, he's not talking about skipping Chkdsk I asked. I'm puzzled by no Minidumps either. The one he sent was an ATi driver, bur he claims 2 or 3 different BSOD's so it seems to be a variety of things.

 

[robisbell]

if he can get into safe mode with networking, try going to http://housecall.trendmicro.com and have it scan the system. also, run Hijack this on it and post the results if you can.

 

[datwater]

When he gets into XP, have him right click my computer, select properties, go to advanced tab, click startup and recovery, uncheck "automatically restart", under system failure. Click ok a couple times, and reboot. Let it bluescreen. Write down the actual BSOD error and post that.

 

[Ausm]

If he can get into safe mode without any problems but gets a BSOD on normal bootup it could be a plethora of problems. I would boot into safe mode run MSconfig and boot up on the most minimal of startup programs first and see if it still does it. If the laptop still boots to a BSOD then it most likely driver related and possibly could be a virus .

Ausm

 

[QueBert]

Thanks for the reply guys, it's not set to auto restart on BSOD, has anyone heard of a system BSOD'ing like crazy and not creating Minidumps though? if I could look at them I could at least see if a DLL or driver is causing the crahes.