Weird BSOD issues

[Mich]

Ultimate version.

A guy I work with is having issues with his laptop. He said the other day it locked up, went to the BSOD, but there was no writing. There were white squiggly lines moving around on the screen. He couldn't C-A-D and had to hard boot.

Just a few minutes ago I saw it happen. He had a BSOD, but the lines weren't moving around. Instead it looked like a BSOD written in Arabic. FYI - he has no need for Arabic language pack. Again, he had to hard boot.

I've looked in the event viewer, but nothing is jumping out at me there. Anyone seen an issue like this?

-If it ain't broke, break it and make it better.

 

[linney]

Perhaps a good place to start would be running the Memory Diagnostic program?

Video Card drivers might benefit from updating, or uninstalling and re-installing.

If it is a genuine BSOD then you would expect the Event Viewer to record such information, what follows is an example of the output you might see. Look for it under Custom/ Administrative, sort the errors alphabetically by clicking on the column header and look under B for bugcheck.

Log Name: System
Source: Microsoft-Windows-WER-SystemErrorReporting
Date: 7/02/2009 7:13:36 AM
Event ID: 1001

The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x0000003b (0x00000000c0000005, 0xfffff96000099f4a, 0xfffff880073b1120, 0x0000000000000000). A dump was saved in: C:\Windows\MEMORY.DMP. Report Id: 020709-22245-01.

You might like to double check that the Startup and Recovery options in System Properties are ticked to write events to the System log.