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My laptop has broken. Majorly. I'm using an IBookG4 at the moment, as when i start the Laptop up it tells me to either start in one of the Safe Modes, from last known good configuration or Start Windows normally, try any of those, it gets to the Windows XP screen then i get a very fast blue screen with a windows error - too fast for me to even read the first sentance.
Errr.....any ideas? The laptop froze up, wouldnt let me use ctrl + alt + delete so i had to hold the off button to get it to restart. Then this happened!
HELP! MACS ARE NOT FRIENDLY!

if its just windows, just reinstall it. Are you running windows by itself? or do you have it running with parallels or bootcamp?

if so it shouldn't be too hard to to reinstall.

That's what you get for having a weasel.

Being dumb here but the laptop was actually given to me by the girlfriends brother - do i need a startup disk for this?
Joe he is a ferret not a weasal

you say it's an ibook g4 but it's booting into windows by default? i believe if you hold the shift button down when you boot it will boot to safe mode. or you can try holding X down instead and it will boot to OSX if it's installed. when you first push power push the selected key and hold it right after you hear the startup chime.

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"That's the trouble with political jokes in this country... they get elected!" -- Dave Lippman

moondog, the laptop that is broken is an Advent, I have to use the iBook until I can get the boot disc.

BSOD= blue-screen-of-death, usually indicates some sort of core problem, whether it be a hack-attempt or a problem somewhere in the partition, if using win-XP, upon start up(I'm not totally sure about notebooks or lap tops) press and hold the F8 key, that should get you straight into "safe-mode", or atleast thats what I do for PC's.
If task manager is not coming up on command, I'd bet your CPU is getting hammered with a auto loading exe.file of some sort ( i.e. DevLdr.exe). Once ya make it into safe mode, access the task manager , click the tab labeled " processes" and look for the running program that is chomping up the CPU usage.(make note) If your not trying to multi task, or have a horrendus number of extra, unnescesary processes running, there should be approx 26-35 programs running in the manager ( each system is going to be a bit different from one user to the next, some more than, some less than)( how many are you running?)
Once into safe mode, see if you can get into the error log files and find the entry for the latest BSOD ( there may be a few, and different entries) there should be a error code within each log file, sometimes info on the type of problem can be found by entering the error code directly into your yahoo or google search windows, and sometimes if your lucky enough you'll find out what the source of that error code is, and corrections that need to be made to get you back up and running ! ( BSOD's are a bugger sometimes)

hope ya get it sorted !!

John.

actually, if you can boot to a CD, go to another computer and download and burn a copy of ultimate boot cd and run the "memtest" tool to see if your memory has gone bad. you will know pretty quick because the screen will be filled with errors. if that test comes back OK then you have a different hardware problem that will be harder to diagnose.

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"That's the trouble with political jokes in this country... they get elected!" -- Dave Lippman

Yeah, there ya go, would be alot more productive than scrounging in half dozen places pulling together error/event logs, I've got a much older version of the UBCD (all sorts of nice to use goodies and nic-nacs) I used a few of the benchmark utilities to try and find out what was happening when I was having problems with a rabid device loader(a common .exe used within soundblaster) that kept looping and reloading itself over and over, about 140 running processes, over 110 of them was the DevLdr.exe , CPU was pegged so hard that usual power-down process was impossible..... hard boot was one of the few things that worked lol.
Did get the problem resolved by means of safe-mode access and the file shredder that Spybot S&D boasts.... been 3 years and no incidents or probs since.


J