Expert: Brian Benosky - 1/10/2009

Question
My sister and I just got laptops for Christmas. Both are Acers(they used to just make motherboards,now the make laptops). Our parents have a wireless router called links-key. My sister's laptop just crashed.she has the notebook laptop,the small one. She downloaded Limewire a week ago(i do know how dangerous limewire can be),Also zwinky and itunes(but never used it cause she doesnt know how). Her laptop began working really slowly about two days ago.and then today, when she was listening to her music on Windows Media Player(windows vista is on hers) it went to a blue screen saying: " windows is having trouble(somthing something,she couldnt remember)".then it said "If this is the first time you have seen this screen, restart your computer.". So, she did. Then it did the same thing the next day. She restarted it, but this time, when it was starting back up, it went to the start up screen asking how she wanted to start it up: Safe-mode, Start Windows normally, etc...  she tried all of them and it would go to the Window's Loading screen,but instead of starting up,the whole screen would flash a blue screen with some kind of long code(literally a flash to fast to see what it said),then it just went back to the start-up screen with like the safe-mode,or start normally, etc. it repeats that same process every time we try to start it.Please help!!!

Answer
Hi Hunter

Since the computer is not able to start, either normally or in Safe Mode, I think that this may not be a malware problem, but a hardware one.  It is entirely possible there is a bad component causing this.  As long as the computer is new, it's definitely covered by warranty, so just contact the place of purchase, or the manufacturer, and have them either fix it, or replace it.  It is a common occurrence, so I don't think it was your sister's fault.  Best of luck.

Brian