XP red screen

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just got off the phone from my dad and it apears that my younger cousins have used his laptop over the weekend and when he came to use it today it flashed up with a red screen and now wont turn on at all.
any advice on this???
is it a virus or a hardware issue?

any help muchly appreciated

 

no post, wont turn on at all and only wont go on since seeing this red screen - can the red screen cause hardware problems that will lead to it not turning on at all

 

has he pulled the power cable? I have had crashes where the PC won't power at all until the power cable has been pulled and re inserted.

 

thanks for the help ken - im off to go and have a look at it this afternoon - will report back any interesting findings

 

I would agree with Ken sounds like there is a major hardware fault but sometimes these can be easily sorted by reseating. My first thoughts would be graphics card is to why the red screen is appearing.

 

ok guys have checked the pc - it does the usual bios checks - then freezes on a black screen then on booting into safe mode it freezes when loading isapnp.sys - googleing this brings up a lot of ways of fixing but my windows xp cd doesnt give the option for repair / recovery console - really dont want to have to format this lot. any ideas chaps

 

Hmmm.. is this official Microsoft media?

I have never seen an XP CD that doesn't give you those options

 

Hi,AllD
Most likely something with ur graphics card or preferences (gamma level and such). check those and see if they are working all right.

Best Wishes
Karls

 

Karls, how do you check software settings like 'preferences', when your computer fails to boot up?

 

My thinking is two possibles :

1) virus (I think it was the Biohazard virus that gave a red screen a few years back although that was after you booted into Xp)

2) I seem to also remember (again from way back - Pentium 1 days (!) ) that there was a board I came across that gave a red screen on a faulty m/b on boot

Do you have a POST card you can plug into a PCI slot which can give you some diagnostics whether it boots or not ?