BSOD locating the problem?

rice4thewin · April 21, 2020

My moms laptop has been getting BSOD for the past few months but never bothered to fix it. She finally asked me to figure out how to fix it but I have no clue whats the problem. Lately it doesnt even show the BSOD screen it just straight up freezes the laptop and you have to force restart it. Its definitely not the HDD though. I tried to put another one in and the problem still persist. If anyone knows what to do I would appreciate it thanks!

QuantumAbacus77 · April 21, 2020

Could be a another faulty component? I had a pc a while ago that would also freeze and BSOD randomly. I ran memtest86 on it and found out one of the ram sticks was bad.

rice4thewin · April 22, 2020

On 4/20/2020 at 9:13 PM, QuantumAbacus77 said:

Could be a another faulty component? I had a pc a while ago that would also freeze and BSOD randomly. I ran memtest86 on it and found out one of the ram sticks was bad.

did you lose your HDD files when you did this?

QuantumAbacus77 · April 23, 2020

8 hours ago, rice4thewin said:

did you lose your HDD files when you did this?

Running memtest86? No, not at all. It runs outside of the OS environment, so it wont touch any files. Just install it onto a usb or CD and follow the website's instructions on how to boot it onto the bad computer. It'll give the RAM a comprehensive memory test and make sure it returns the expected results. The test can take a while to complete and you might want to let it cycle a couple of times, but if it finds even one error, then you likely have faulty ram. When I ran the test it only found 3 errors, but they were enough to make my computer practically unusable. I sent the bad ram stick back to gskill, who replaced it at no cost, even though I'd had the stick for several years by that point, so kudos to them.

I don't think you can do that in the case of your mom's laptop though. I don't know how old that laptop, is maybe you could find some compatible ram for dirt cheap to replace what's in there.