Problem with new Dell computer (blue screen and random restarts)

[TheMetetron]

It started about 4 days ago (before I left for Vegas).

Basically on start-up (as I was logining in, or right before), my computer was consistently bluescreening (with a different STOP message each time). Sometimes it would let me on the computer for a few minutes and then it would bluescreen me. Sometimes, there was no bluescreen and it would just restart itself for fun.

Dell support was a ton of no help and it took me 2 days to try to get a decent answer from them. I get the feeling someone is going to have to come out to fix this.

Anyways, I left for the weekend and now I'm back. When I got back, the first startup automatically restarted right after I logged in. After that, however, I haven't had any problems (edit, I should mention I did a full system restore after restore points failed to work... even after this, it still bluescreeed me).

So, I've been on the computer for 10-15 minutes now just doing web browsing, installing antivirus stuff, uninstalling stupid dell crap and doing windows updates while restarting after each of these.

So far no problems... does anyone have any idea what it could have been / still is? I'm just waiting until I try to 8 table on Party and it inevitably crashes on me. I'm going to try putting my SQL database for PokerTracker on my external hard drive from now on in case that was doing something.

Anyways, I'm pissed and hopefully it works now. I'm cautiously optimistic, however.

[JinX11]

Is this one of the new XPS systems? Probably a shot in the dark, but he had a similar problem with a Dell XPS straight out of the box; he was able to narrow it down to a bad sound card (Dell helped him out without any hassle, shipping him a new sound card). Otherwise, it sounds like you might have a hard drive going bad, perhaps.

I wonder if you step-by-step through the system start-up, if you can localize the problem.

Best of luck.

[TheMetetron]

I (they) now think it's a bad memory module. A simple google search of one of the stop messages 0x0000008e would have shown this. Glad it took Dell support a combined 5 hours.