Vista BSOD

Vista Home Premium on a Dell laptop XPS M1710. Upon loading Vista, it gets as far as a black screen, then the mouse pointer arrow thingy shows up for maybe 5 seconds, then the BSOD. Here's the details:

I looked around the MS Knowledge Base and found very little, and nothing related to Vista. Does anyone have any insight? Thanks.

 

Quick question, does safe mode boot?

 

In Safe Mode it does the same thing, but the BSOD flashes too quickly to be seen. I have to disable auto-restart to see the message. I've also tried the Repair option at the top of the F8 boot options menu with no luck.

 

Have you checked/updated bios, worked for some with this error.

See links below

http://search.microsoft.com/results...a&qsc0=0&FORM=QBME1&l=1&mkt=en-US&PageType=99

Dell Bios updates:
http://search.dell.com/results.aspx...si=&spf=&ssysid=&ssysn=&stag=&~srd=f&~ck=anav

 

Thanks. I'll try the BIOS update. I don't suppose it could hurt. The thing is, the laptop came with Vista preloaded, it wasn't upgraded from XP to Vista. As far as I know, no updates have been installed either. But it's not my laptop, so I'll ask the owner about the updates. Anyway, thanks again for the link. I looked far and wide, and found nothing.... I'll let you know how it goes

 

You also need to ask your chap what other software he has loaded recently.
Traditionally this error has been associated with conflicts between Windows and software which replaces part of it. (such as GINA) AV products are prime candidates here.
The second common source of this error has been when there is a (domain) conflict between the way permissions and the drives are set up.
Is this laptop also set up for a works network?
Remember also that with Vista you can get into the system restore/recovery process from the DVD.

 

Yeah, I tried that too. No dice. I'm going to try the BIOS route here in a few minutes and we'll see what happens (fingers crossed).

 

Flashed the BIOS successfully.... still got the BSOD :banghead Is it possible to do a safe repair install with Vista like you can with Windows XP? And if it is possible, will it even help the situation?

 

Thanks for the info... I can't get in touch with the PC's owner so far today so I'm just going to wait... I did try a system restore, a startup repair, and a restore from a backup, but none of these worked. Either no current backup was available, or when I tried the system restore to a previous date, I get the message that it isn't functioning due to "Incompatible version of the serializing package (0x80070724)"... I'm looking for info on that error right now. If ya'll have any info, feel free to post
Thanks.

EDIT- I found this http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940970/en-us but I can't boot to Windows so it doesn't help (is FreeCell the underlying problem here?!?! Freekin' FREECELL?!?!?!)

 

How about the old method of last resort, a second parallel installation?