A crash course in getting a laptop running again

Q: I have a 5-year-old Dell Inspiron 600 M laptop. The laptop has been crashing more and more frequently lately, and I've basically been ignoring it (with no good reason except laziness, insecurity with how to proceed and not enough need to fix until now). It now crashes within 15 seconds of turning on, and stays stuck on the blue screen, with no way to abort except to pull the battery. Not a good practice, I appreciate, but it has been the only thing that has worked so far.

The basic message is that Windows has encountered a problem and shut down to prevent damage to the computer. The initial error identification is "IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL" There is a second string of technical info at the bottom of the message, and other standard language about Advanced Startup Options, Safe Mode restart, etc.

My sense is that I now need to have a pro look at this, tell me what to do to fix whatever is wrong (or do it for me), plus do some other refinements I could use.

Dave Baylor, Seattle

A: If it were my laptop, I'd try starting from scratch. And by that I mean reinstall Windows, and when the installation program gives you the option to install over the existing operating system or reformat the drive and do a fresh install, pick that latter option.

Here's the deal. The operating system isn't working and we don't know whether the problem is some badly written program or driver that is gumming up the works, or a hard drive that is going bad ... or some of the system memory is bad ... or a virus ... . Reinstalling and reformatting should take care of most of the possible problems except bad hardware. So if you reinstall everything and the problem reappears, then suspicion falls heavily on the computer itself.

Next, you have to figure out whether you want to spend the money having a shop trouble-shoot a 5-year-old computer or put that shop fee toward a new laptop. Given how inexpensive new laptops are, that's a close call.

Q: I use Vista and AOL. For the past several months, I get the sound of a door slamming on my speaker periodically when on the Internet. In the past couple of weeks a new sound has been added — the "ahooga" of an old-style car horn is heard once or twice an hour. Any ideas on cause?

Ted Beck

That said, I do know that many users reported similar problems and the cause turned out to be AOL sound effects. The door-slamming sound was generated when somebody on your contact list signed off. I'm not sure about the car horn, but I'd suggest seeing if you ever get the bothersome sounds when you don't have AOL running.

Another likely possibility is that something may be conflicting with your sound driver. That something could be a misbehaving program or driver or an outside source of electrical interference. I even heard from one user who traced a similar problem to signals from a television's infrared sensor interfering with the infrared port on his laptop. If you have such a port, disable it and see if any of the sounds stop.

Q: I have a Dell laptop running Microsoft Vista. Recently my PC has been shutting down automatically after I've been on Internet Explorer for about a half-hour. This started happening right after my ISP upgraded its routers, so I was wondering if this could be the problem. The last time I had a problem like this was when my old computer had a virus, but as far as I know that is not the problem now. I don't know whether to check with Dell, Microsoft, my ISP or all three.

Elaine Stark

A: Do you mean by "shutting down" that the computer powers off, or just that it is no longer connected to the Internet?

If the computer is powering down, I'd suspect a hardware issue, such as overheating. If you mean that you lose your Internet connectivity after a half-hour, I'd contact your ISP. It may be that it is not refreshing your IP address or that it has a line problem. As you suggest, the problem may be a virus, but before assuming that, you'd want to check with your ISP.

Questions for Patrick Marshall may be sent by e-mail to pmarshall@seattletimes.com or pgmarshall@pgmarshall.net, or by mail at Q&A/Technology, The Seattle Times, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.