Computer Help Required

[Tetsuwan Convoy]

I just got a new laptop. Its running Vista as the OS and I spent yesterday updating Vista and getting the Norton up to date.

All I did after that was slap in the discs that came with the computer and set up the email thing.

Today U cracnked it up and it gave me the blue screen of death before anything had happend, so I turned it off, rebooted in safemode and ran a virus scan. Nothing came up.

Considering how its only 2 days old and already has the blue screen showing (although only once), should I be concerned? SHould I run the recovery disc or check anything? Or isn't it that much of a concern?

Any help appreciated.

[Kyle]

I don't know anything about Vista. But wouldn't be too worried about it until it happens a 2nd or 3rd time.

What brand is your new laptop by the way?

[Tetsuwan Convoy]

Its an ASUS.

Nice and shiny new with a graphics card as well aparently. Even though I never used one before

[valkyrie_76]

Might just be a minor crash. Mine has bluescreened I think 3 times and they were due to a USB driver or a video driver (in the 18 months I have owned my laptop). What did the report say when it crashed?

[blackie]

mine bluescreaned 5 times in 3 hrs one day

get avast antivirus and do a before boot scan, that might turn something up

[Sam]

My suggestion is to see if you can turn off Norton and go with a freeware anti-virus first (such as AVG or Anti-Vir - both available from download.com), then reboot and see if anything breaks.

Also see if you can find out about the programs / processes that run when the PC starts, and try to disable as many of them as possible.

This way you can isolate and narrow down the source of the problem (e.g. sometimes two or more programs running at the same time may conflict).

Also, how much RAM does your laptop have? I think you should only consider running Vista if you have 2GB or more of RAM, Vista is kinda memory hungry.

I hope these suggestions help.

[Tetsuwan Convoy]

Thanks for the help guys.

Yeh its got 2gig of ram and Vista came installed on it.

Is Norton a bit of a crappy anti virus, I figured that it would be better than AVG/Avira coz it costs money. I used to use AVG on my old computer and thought it was ace.

[Fungal Infection]

Just cause you pay for something doesn't mean its a better product. I highly recommend Avast - its free, doesn't hog system resources and has NEVER conflicted with anything I've used.

[Tetsuwan Convoy]

Just cause you pay for something doesn't mean its a better product. I highly recommend Avast - its free, doesn't hog system resources and has NEVER conflicted with anything I've used.

i hear good things about Avast.

Onto another setup problem.

I have Vista Home Premium and have set up a jap keyboard sos I can do kanji etc, but in my windows mail, some of the characters aren't displaying properly. The Interenet explorer sems to do ok, although there is the occasional site that doesn't work. I can read and type emails in Japanese, just some of the names are off.

Beginning to hate Vista a little bit already...

Managed to work it out. All is good now. Just had to change the region seting a little so it assumed that script that wasn't encoeded properly was Japanese and it works fine now! HURRAH!

[sifun]

downgrade to XP!

but on the other note, you probably need to reinstall. Maybe format if you can.