Computer keeps crashing and giving STOP errors

Hi everyone,

My parents' 2-year-old HP Pavillion Media Centre m8200n desktop with Vista Home Premium SP1 is basically dead. For the past few months it would get the BSOD with various stop error codes every so often. No application/action seemed to cause it; it would just happen randomly. After turning the machine off and on again it was usually fine.

In the past week it started doing it more and more until yesterday when the computer would only stay on for a few minutes and then either go to the BSOD or a black screen. After turning it off and on it would stay on without crashing for shorter and shorter periods of time until it couldn't even get to the user selection screen. After leaving it off for a while and then turning it on it will go back to being able to stay active for a few minutes again but no longer, and then it just repeats the cycle of the time it can go without crashing decreasing. A few times when it crashes a high-pitched repeated beep comes from the tower. When I boot the computer into safe mode it can last a few minutes longer but not much, and eventually still crashes.

After rebooting the computer and basically giving up on trying to recover the files left on there because the thing won't stay responsive for long enough to let me, I decided to run system restore. The computer came with a recovery partition so I tried to recover from that. The first time I tried to get the recovery program to back up our personal files but it crashed as soon as it had gone through them and told me how many DVDs I needed to save the files. I rebooted, went back into system restore and just went straight into restoring the computer without bothering to do the backup.

Surprisingly that worked and completed without crashing. I restarted it and after going through the "welcome to Windows" stuff it seemed perfectly fine... and then after a few hours it crashed again, and is now doing the exact same things that I described above again, except now instead of hanging on the blue screen it restarts itself. Parents want to take it in to be fixed but I thought I'd ask around here to see if there's anything I can do first.

As I said it's been crashing every so often for a while so I think it was just bound to completely conk out eventually but if this helps, the only things they've installed lately are Norton 360 and the SFTP application WinSCP. This was before I did the system restore - after I did that they installed Norton 360 again.

Also, here are a few of the STOP codes they got (they seemed to be different each time):
0x000000BE (0xC0000005, 0x8EC74DC8, 0x8B120C3C, 0x00000000)
0x00000024 (0x001904AA, 0xA6BE48AC, 0xA6BE45A8, 0x824BD466)
0x0000008E (0xC0000065, 0x00000010, 0x87203F08, 0x000000000)

Thanks for any help - much appreciated!

Edited by vn13, 27 May 2010 - 01:09 PM.

to BC, vn13.

Download BlueScreenView
No installation required.
Double click on BlueScreenView.exe file to run the program.
When scanning is done, go Edit>Select All.
Go File>Save Selected Items, and save the report as BSOD.txt.
Open BSOD.txt in Notepad, copy all content, and paste it into your next reply.

Is it overheating? Speedfan will report temps for you. Since you said it would work for shorter and shorter periods, that leads me to believe it is overheating and can't cool off before you try to use it again.

Get a can of compressed air and blow out all the innerds. Make sure the fan(s) aren't caked in dust.

Oops me and KN posted at the same time. ha Also glad to see you back KN

Edited by computerxpds, 27 May 2010 - 02:25 PM.

Hey keyboardNinja and computerxpds, thanks for responding. We blew some air into the tower and then took a look inside - there was almost no dust on the fan and the problems persisted. My dad ended up just getting fed up with the computer and taking it in to the shop before I was able to run BlueScreenView unfortunately. Thanks for the help (and the welcome) anyway - you guys here at BC are amazing.

Edited by vn13, 27 May 2010 - 07:52 PM.

Well thats one way to fix it hope they can fix it up for you. If problems still persist you know where to post.

Edited by computerxpds, 27 May 2010 - 08:49 PM.