Blue Screen of Death while loading windows.. suspect bad vid card or virus... thoughts?

Sounds to me like a bad video card. I'm pretty sure you don't have to replace the whole computer as another suggested.

Reasons why it is not driver/hardware failure:

This guy has been running fine with his pc til just recently he gets a bsod on start up.... This is a virus.

There is nothing wrong with your hardware... Granted it could remotely be possible that your VGA did overheat and die (out of no where) but this would require the user to either have overclocked it or for faulty hardware, which I suspect is not the reason as there are not other reports of faulty hardware for this pc).

Your best bet is to reformat or find a way to find the root file of that virus. PC hardware is incredibly durable, and hard drives last for at minimum 8-10 years.. I seriously doubt u have a failing hard drive, which can cause BSOD's but not the error inquestion. With hard drive failures you will get numerous dll errors due to corruption of the windows install files..

If reformartting doesn't fix it, then it most likely is your graphics, which can be replaced.. but I seriously insist on doing a system reformat before cracking open your laptop..

The old blue screen of death, the biggest percentage of the time is RAM vs Virtual memory, ur computer is telling that there is something wrong, instead of killing ur system ur computer fainted, that BS of D, virtual memory in windows is page filing, which sometimes is 1.5 gig's up 2 2 gig's, U can change ur page filing from C t D & select no page filing on C, But when was the last time u did any maintenance on ur PC, Like a check disk for error's, a disk clean-up & a defrag, also which bit does ur mobo take, 32 r 64, finely run ur games on a clean boot, u get all that ram the doesn't need to use.:)

Error 8E

A kernel mode program generated an exception which the error handler didn’t catch. These are nearly always hardware compatibility issues (which sometimes means a driver issue or a need for a BIOS upgrade).

Like you I would suggest your video/graphics card - you should not need to reformat. Any chance you can borrow a vid card to test?

wdw

You can not load Windows from within itself. Factory Default Recovery for XP on a dell computer is Ctrl + F11 while booting up. Check the menus to see if they installed a program to make your own set of recovery CDs, if there make them.

That bluescreen is normally caused by a rootkit virus that goes undetectable once it is installed, and prevents XP from booting normally and causing all sorts of problems. Heres the link on how to remove it. Good Luck!

http://icrontic.com/forum/showthread.php?t=50966

Yeah its your graphics card. Problem is that the graphics cards on note book are built onto the logic board so you need to replace the whole computer if you want it to get working again. You can't take out just the video card either. The best idea is just to buy a new computer.

do a system recovery or if you have a windows disc, reinstall from the cd. sounds like your reg is totaly capoot. a video card wouldnt do that. when you see a blue screen its the main boot sector of your hard drive thats in trouble. the sooner you fix it the better.

could be hard drive. i had the blue screen at work, and it guy change hard drive because it was corrupting.

i dunno maybe its a trojan virus you should probably call a computer mechanic that deals with that kind of stuff so you dont try to fix it and mess it up even further.