"Pat Conover" pat conover at comcast dot net wrote in message
...
My brother's Dim 4550 starting doing a BSOD after booting, your computer
has been shutdown to protect it...runs for about 15 seconds before
shutting down. Stock 4550, 512MB RAM, XP Home (maybe up to date?). One
of his kids had just loaded Ages of Empires III on the machine when it
started and forgot to tell Dad.

It boots and runs in safe mode, but always crashes when booted normally.
I thought a power, heat or HD problem. I cleaned the machine, which was
filthy with all the vents completely blocked. Thought that was the
problem, heat and Intel shutdown, but no luck. I ran the Dell diagnostics
on the HD, MB and video card and all seemed to pass. It has the stock
NVIDIA GeForce4 MX420 video card, same as my 4550. Ran defrag on the C
drive, which was badly fragmented and will run a chkdsk today. Have to
check the startups too, since who the Dell knows what's been DL and
installed on this.

Any suggestions from my favorite DellBots? Otherwise, it's pull all the
cards and test one by one... Guess I'm looking for some shortcuts.

Thanks, Pat
Forgot to add, that I did a system restore to Before the Ages of Empires
game was installed. I forgot to uninstall first though... Pat