Blue screen with loads of writing on start up

[MollieO]

Problem with my laptop. On starting a blue coloured screen flashes up telling me there is a problem but it doesn't stay long enough for me to actually read. How do I get to read what it says?

oh, that's the blue screen of death

am not even joking, do you have anyone who can look at it for you?

No. I managed to system restore earlier and it worked this afternoon fine. Went off to do something else, screen froze then it crashed. Mentioned something on the blue screen about removing hardware. Ds plugged in a keyboard the other day but that wasn't in when it crashed the first time last night.

It starts in safe mode.

BSOD is not good

I'm going to try system restore to an earlier date. No idea if that will help though

dp says if you can get onto the computer then back up anything important on there. get it onto cd or memory stick or whatever.

you could try re-installing everything

It mentioned BIOS didn't see BSOD. What's that?

I would back up and do a windows reinstall

Am trying to get it working long enough to back up. Stupid not to have backed up before. Photos all on there although saved via iTunes so not sure if they are stored elsewhere. Not concerned about other stuff.

BSOD is blue screen of death.

What happens after you see it?

Computer turns itself off and then back on and I get the black screen with the set up menu. If I choose anything other than safe mode the computer turns off and then on again and the blue screen flashes up very briefly.

How can I get to read the blue screen?

One of the most common causes of the delightful BSOD is bad device drivers.

Unplug every single device from the computer that you can leaving the absolute bare minimum of just a keyboard.

Then see if the machine is happy to boot up and switch off a few times.

Page fault_in non paged area

That is the error message I get on the blue screen (is all in capitals if that makes a difference).

what OS are you using? Windows? which version?

n4.mini.sys is what it says immediately before that.

OP is windows xp

I'd probably still suspect a faulty driver causing the problem. Is there any mention of a filename? Something like File.sys or File.dll ?

But it could be something physical, you can also get that error if you've got memory problems, do you know anything about adding or removing memory chips from the machine?

go into safe mode and then:

Control Panel>System
Advanced Tab
Startup and Recovery section
Settings button
Locate "Automatically Restart" checkbox. Uncheck it.
Then click OK, OK

that should make it pause on the blue screen so you can read it

Could it say nv4_mini.sys?

The completely correct file name could be very important in terms of tracking down what this is.

Yes Badgers it does say that. What does that mean?

graphics card then

what do you have the laptop on? is it getting too hot?

It's a video card driver from nVidia, and as said drivers are the typical cause of this sort of problem.

What you need to do is to uninstall that driver and then install a new one.

I'm not on a Windows XP machine right now and I can't recall the exact way of doing that, if you've played with drivers before it's not rocket science, but it can be a bit fiddly.

There are some instructions from MS here:
support.microsoft.com/kb/292460

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