I was called up by a client today because their computer wouldn't boot up. And I'm not talking out one of those easily identifiable hardware problems of the system will not turn on or some such. No this was much more interesting. It would boot up, seem to be working for all of 10 seconds and then restart. Now 10 seconds isn't a lot of time to troubleshoot a problem, but I managed enough done that I could turn off the automatic reboot feature enabled to see the glorious blue screen.
Yes I mean glorious. You see these blue screens provide technicians with a whole host of information as to what's actually going wrong on your computer. You may think it looks like just a bunch of numbers, but to a technician it tells us exactly what is going wrong. So I went about my usual procedure of trying to identify what was causing this particular kernel mode error.
I rebooted in safe mode; I restored the last known good configuration; I rolled the system back with system restore; nothing seemed to want to work -- I would keep getting the reboots. I was starting to think this might actually be a hardware problem. It wasn't out of the question; hardware problems can cause blue screens quite often. I was about to call this a memory error based on what the blue screen was telling me. Luckily I stayed with it just a little bit longer.
A pretty good practice to get into when trying to fix a problem, is turning off the antivirus software; so I did that but it still didn't work. I uninstalled antivirus software instead. Well what do you know? It worked! In this case it was AVG. Now this isn't unheard of for antivirus software to interfere with your computer in such a drastic way. This can occur with Norton, McAfee, and a host of other very popular programs.
This blog isn't to be a technical source for how to repair these problems but more to point out what could be causing it. The next time you encounter a really strange blue screen try uninstalling your antivirus software (you can always reinstall later), it just may save you an awful lot of time and trouble. And if it was your antivirus software, I'd replace it with AVIRA, available from www.free-AV.com.
Happy computing
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