Help with Toshiba Satellite M35X-S349/Laptop

I'm a new Geek, though hardly a geek and will leave it at novice.

Here are my specs:
Toshiba Satellite m35X-S349
Windows XP SP2
Intel Pentium M processor 1.70GHz,480MB(RAM)

i have had my laptop for about 4 years now. running like a top until 3 weeks ago when it crashed. I did a clean sweep and lost all of my data(very little of it was backed up, hence why I'm really not a geek and just a novice).

It ran fine until 3 days later when it began rebooting itself for hours on end. Took it to the GeekSquad (ripoff) who ran a diagnostics to tell me that there was no Hardware malfunction.

Since I am a Grad student I asked around the library for a few of the technicians to lend a hand. They ran all sorts of ram diagnostics (dimm something??), this and that and also could not figure out why my computer kept restarting itself and occassionally showing a BLUE screen.

Days later I encountered a few real Geeks who figured out that my problem was- an outdated Intel/Proset Internet wireless card driver being out of date. They installed it and my laptop has been fine, until today.

I got the infamous BLUE SCREEN again. Here is what it states and I am hoping this forum might have some suggestions on how to go about fixing what my computer may have:

Technical info:

" STOP: 0x0000008E (0x0000005, 0x80567AF7, 0xEDB87918, 0x00000000)

Beginning dump of physical memory
Physical memory dump complete
Contact your system administrator or technical support group for further assistance."

any help would be greatly appreciated.:confused


Thank you,
SW

 

The error 0x0000008E can be caused by many different things, including a virus called HaxDoor. When does the error occur? Does it pop up when coming out of standby? Does it happen when browsing through your files on the hard drive? Are any file names listed when the blue screen error occurs? If the error appears to be random, take a look here and see if it helps: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/945658/en-us

 

thank you so much dlb. sorry for the delay in getting back to you. will follow your suggestions and inform you of any outcome(s).

sw:wave