Every time I turned my PC on I get blue screened and a weird zig zag screen too. I just formatted yesterday in hope of solving the problem, but it is still happening. Does anyone know of a program I can run that will check my hardware inside my computer? I can't afford to take it the shop, and would really like to know the main source. Once the computer is running for a good 3 mins, it rarely blue screens.. it's just the start up that makes it go crazy

Post your specs, it would probably help.

Manufacturer:
DELL Inc.
Processor:
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz (8 CPUs), ~2.7GHz
Memory:
4 GIG RAM
Hard Drive:
483 GB
Video Card:
ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series



copied off my xfire profile
www.xfire.com/profile/sheikx

screen zig zagging :. possible video card malfunctioning?

Try booting without your gfx card, without 1 stick of ram and without the optical.

www.resplendence.com/whocrashed
can tell you within reason what is making your system bsod

What the **** lol, if you take all them out you won't be able to boot past the bios

.....

onboard? if she has 4gb of ram, probably 2x2gb of ram? meaning it will still have 1 stick. and you dont need an opitcal drive to boot lol

Whats the blue screen error that you get?

That would be the first thing

If it flashes past too quickly to tell, then tap F8 repeatedly on startup, and hit the option 'disable restart on system failure'

And we'll go from there.

On Fri 30/12/2011 3:40:49 AM GMT your computer crashed
crash dump file: C:\Windows\Minidump\123011-38781-01.dmp
This was probably caused by the following module: volsnap.sys (volsnap+0xA300)
Bugcheck code: 0xBE (0xFFFFF88001571300, 0x8000000003E62121, 0xFFFFF88002FFB4E0, 0xA)
Error: ATTEMPTED_WRITE_TO_READONLY_MEMORY
file path: C:\Windows\system32\drivers\volsnap.sys
product: Microsoft® Windows® Operating System
company: Microsoft Corporation
description: Volume Shadow Copy Driver
Bug check description: This is issued if a driver attempts to write to a read-only memory segment.
This appears to be a typical software driver bug and is not likely to be caused by a hardware problem.
The crash took place in a standard Microsoft module. Your system configuration may be incorrect. Possibly this problem is caused by another driver on your system which cannot be identified at this time.

not every motherboard has onboard gfx

On Fri 30/12/2011 3:56:35 AM GMT your computer crashed
crash dump file: C:\Windows\Minidump\123011-39998-01.dmp
This was probably caused by the following module: usbport.sys (USBPORT+0x78AC)
Bugcheck code: 0x7F (0x8, 0x80050033, 0x6F8, 0xFFFFF8800428F8AC)
Error: UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP
file path: C:\Windows\system32\drivers\usbport.sys
product: Microsoft® Windows® Operating System
company: Microsoft Corporation
description: USB 1.1 & 2.0 Port Driver
Bug check description: This bug check indicates that the Intel CPU generated a trap and the kernel failed to catch this trap.
The crash took place in a standard Microsoft module. Your system configuration may be incorrect. Possibly this problem is caused by another driver on your system which cannot be identified at this time. Text much larger than default[/HUGE]

run memtest86+

It boots off a CD

almost every board does

given her outline of the problem I would also suspect possible gpu malfunction.
booting from onboard with only one dimm of ram is a pretty standard step in attempting to deduce where teh malfunction lies by process of elimination.

dw hektik doesnt know anything :>