Ok, so I have a HP dv6000 that's only about 6 months old... (its a notebook) 140gb hard drive, 1gb ram, AMD athlon 64 X2 dual core processor tk-53, and an Nvidia geforce 7150m graphic card, running on windows vista (ahhh!) So, the problem is, every single day my computer crashes at least twice. The crash is in such a way as, if i open more then maybe 4 tabs in firefox, or open two youtube videos at one time, it crashes. The screen stops and it stays still frame for a few seconds before it proceeds to go black...After a while, i get a blue screen telling me there was an unknown error and windows is dumping physical memory to disk... Anyways, this is super annoying and i would appreciate any help that i could get, because i am tired of my laptop always crashing... If you guys need any more info just ask, Thanks!
There's your problem right there. Diagnosis, get yerself some more RAM, another 1 gig stick will do wonders. Go to crucialmemory.com and look for the RAM analyzer or something (I would provide a direct link but the site is under maintenance right now). It will tell you what kind of RAM you have, what your motherboard can handle and what kind of RAM you can use to upgrade. Hope this helps
When I was testing Vista I had a lot of problems with the way Vista handles the video card drivers. Put XP on it. I'm an I T professional and most of us out there try to stay away from Vista, because of things like this. Put XP or ubuntu linux on it. You will be happier.
i use ubuntu all the time, although, i haven't installed it or anything. I just use the cd... Thanks! and yeah, i'll check the site out... let's see what happens I really hate vista
Update video drivers. Test memory. Buy more memory (replace memory if memory shows to be faulty) Is it overclocked at all? If you're not sure, did you buy it new, or did you buy it from someone? As a sidenote, Vista isn't nearly as terrible when I first used it about a year ago. The numerous fixes + SP1 have helped a ton. It's by no means near where XP is in terms of stability/compatibility, but it's at least on the right track. I jumped from Vista to XP around November. Finally made the switch back around April and I haven't had any problems with it.
If you switch to Ubuntu or XP that gig should be good enough for you. Vista is a memory hog. When I was testing on a box with 2 gigs of memory a whole gig was used up just after boot. XP won't do that to you and definitely Ubuntu will run great with that gig. If you said you tried Ubuntu maybe also give Mint Linux a try. You can run it from the cd like ubuntu and its actually made on the ubuntu build. But it is more ready to go out of the box then ubuntu is, but sometimes you just need windows and if you need it go with XP over Vista.
yeah, thanks everyone! After consulting a few people and thinking about it, I'm super sure it's the RAM that's giving me the problem... I'll definitely upgrade to at least 2 gb Once again, Thanks!
Yeah, looks like you've found your answer. But I'd like to add that even on 1gb of ram there's no way in hell your computer should be crashing under those circumstances. I've run way more stuff than that and never had a crash (running a VM, browser w/ many tabs open, Visual Studio) all in Vista. Stuff will definitely run painfully slow, but never crash. While 1 gb is making stuff slow, bad ram itself is causing your crashes.
