Diagnosis needed

[Fordblue625]

I know next to nothing about computers, but since this site is the home of the internet God and others, I"ll give it a try.
My system is a Gen5 Dell xps, 3.6mhz dual core, 512mb nvidia card, 2gigs of ram with xp. That's about all I know about it. Long story short, about a week ago it started shutting itself off and rebooting in the middle of gameplay. A few days later it wouldn't boot past the initial windows loading screen before giving me the blue screen of death. I never had any error messages until then, so I thought maybe the vidcard was overheating, or the power supply was fucked up. I replaced the vid card with an indentical one that I had to no avail. I'll try to get the chkstop codes that it gives later. Any ideas on what should I be looking for and checking?

[Kenny_Stang]

Could be allot of things, right now I would say it sounds hardware related, possibly your memory. If your system comes with two seperate sticks of RAM, remove one and try booting up, then if you still get the BSOD, try using the other. If your system has onboard video as well as your graphics card, remove your graphics card and see if it will boot OK with just the on board video.

Once you get the codes from the BSOD, do a search on them on Microsoft's website and see if they have any articles on what could be causing the problem.

[Fordblue625]

OK, the codes from the BSOD are:
0x0000007B, 0XF7B524, 0XC0000034.
I tried switching the memory out 1 stick at a time, and had no luck there. Any help is appreciated.

[Kenny_Stang]

From looking up those codes it sounds like either your hard drive is going out or your OS install is corrupt. Also could be your IDE controller.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324103