Hey guys,

I recently convinced my mom to buy her own computer, she only wanted it for games and I was tired of fighting her off mine. I saw someone was selling a P3 for 150...i don't have all the specs with me, but it sounded pretty good and I bought a camera off him before which works great.

Anyways, i installed her fave games on there and she played it for awhile then she started getting this, the screen will go blue and it says " Hardware Malfunction, check with vendor"

Now the guy told me that I might want to reinstall Windows so I been trying to do that but the d*** thing won't boot from disc, it just does the partial reintall. I went to the BIOS and changed the sequence to CDROM and nothing. I really don't know what to do. I went to Microsoft and looked up the error i'm getting and it said to check the ram and the bios.

Has this happened to anyone before and can you give me some help/advice/encouragement. I emailed the guy i got it from and he said that maybe he deleted something while he was cleaning it up before he sold it? does this sound possible?

What version of Windows are you trying to install on it? Do you have a legal Windows CD? Some of the hacked CDs do not have the boot loader and will not let the setup boot from the CD.

I'm trying to use Windows XP and it is a legal copy. Any ideas?

anymore ideas on this? it's happening more and more.

you might try running System file check with the original disk. SFC will check the operating system components against what should be there.

Try running from the start run SFC.exe /scannow

I just put another hard drive in that I had and reformatted it and I got the same d*** error after so I know it's not the HD. GRRR

What is the error code on the blue screen.

I have the same problem. There are no error codes, just "hardware malfunction. please contact vendor"

this problem does not happen when using win98 , only while using XP/2k

Okay... The system boots right and then when playing a game you get the hardware malfunction right??? What is the game??? Also... You might want to check to be certain you have all the latest drivers. Check your components and get the latet drivers.

my comp crashes without notice, usually during heavy processing such as running winamp. sometimes it crashes during start-up or while logging into my windows account. it seems lyk a random thing but multi-tasking greatly increases chance of crashing.

i updated all the drivers i could using Device Manager, but still the d*** "Hardware malfunction. please contact vendor. ** system halted ** " message appears.

If you go to event viewer, you should be able to get a message to say what the stop error was. Look in the system event viewer and see if it gives you any info.