Compaq Laptop problems

My girlfriend has a Compaq Presario V2000 notebook with XP. Well it's about 1.5 years old and the warrenty she has is expired, so there is no sending it back and telephone support to find out what is wrong is pretty expensive. So it's up to me to figure it out... I guess.

Well anyway, she said to me one day, "my computer is dead." She over reacts and after asking what was wrong I found out the computer is not dead but simply seemed to have a virus. She said that when she would open a program it would get really slow and the screen would turn black and then restart. It would do that any time you opened a program and if it was connected to the network, no one on the network would be able to get on the web. Definatly sounds like a virus.

She was anxious to reformat so I never got to see any of these problems first hand, it is just what she explains to me. But anyway she reformatted and everything seemed fine but then she got the blue screen of death and her computer restarted. Well I decided to take a look at it and everything seemed to be working fine, although she didn't have any drivers downloaded. So I started downloading drivers and just doing some normal stuff on the web and I too get the blue screen of death after about 30 min.

Any Ideas why? I have a feeling that it might be the ram. So I'm going to reseat that. Any other guesses or tips?

Run a MemTest to check if it's the memory.
Also could be the hard drive. I think there's some diagnostics you can run to confirm/dismiss that as well.

I'm sure DMorris will be here to give you all the advice you need -- but that's a start.

Yeah usually your school IT services will check that stuff for you. If it is not that, it might be the motherboard.

also, its a compaq

It's not the hdd, because I ran the diagnostic for that. I'm not sure where the diagnostic for the ram is, but my gf did end up taking it to the ResComp. So that means I dont' have to deal with it anymore.

Thanks