Failing laptop components.

I recently inherited a Compaq nc6220 laptop. It has a ton of bloatware, but an XP Pro product key on a sticker, and I have a disc, so I didn't think that would be a problem. I was happy with my free toy, and started working on it, with the intent of presenting the Guy with a fully set up, fully functional, and very own laptop to play around with (which would make him leave my laptop alone--everyone wins!)

Sadly, the 6220 is not in good shape. It is very difficult to boot, and only does so once out of every seven or ten attempts. It is prone to freeze and crash, and then not reboot when prompted. It frequently gives me the legendary blue screen, with the STOP error message 0x00000050. According to what I could find in Microsofts articles this error message belongs to Windows 2000 and Windows NT, and means hardware failure involving RAM.

There are two problems with the above answer, however.

The first one is that the laptop is running XP Pro. The second is that the two 1GB modules that were installed less than a month ago have passed several memtests with flying colors. To me that suggests that something else that is involved with RAM, is failing me.

The laptop rarely ever boots, so running diagnostics is difficult, but suggestions for a good utility are more than welcome. Cold boots seem to be more successful than reboots, for some reason.

Anyway, what say ye, o sage members of the MG community? Is there anyone out there who could help me identify the cause of the boot problems?

 

This is what I get for your Error message Mimsy, which makes some sense. A quick check in Device Manager should show some flags, possible a corrupted driver.

Hope that helps

 

Troubleshooting options from HP
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/genericDocument?docname=c00371993&dlc=en&lc=en&cc=us

 

Sorry for not checking in sooner. Life and work have both been very hectic lately.

A peek in device manager did show several yellow exclamation marks, one of them on the wireless adapter. No surprise, the wireless on this thing is very flaky. Clicking on any of the devices with yellow marks caused a spectacular blue-screen crash that gave the exact same error message as before. After several failed attempts, I managed to reboot and by freak luck was able to uninstall most of the flagged devices. Drivers have been downloaded from HP's website and are sitting on one of my many USB drives, just waiting for the next time I manage to reboot the nc6220.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll probably be back again later this weekend, if I need more help.

 

Aha! Progress.

After uninstalling the three(!) wireless managers I managed to remove the drivers for eth wireless adapter, reboot, and reinstall them. Another successful reboot, and I am wireless on this laptop as well. It has only frozen up once and has rebooted without issues, so the wireless driver probably contributed. Now if only I can get the other drivers working right...