ok,

for the past week my computer has been causing some problems when being turned on. ill turn it on, then it well go fine until the windows loading page. there instead of continuing, most times it will flash this blue screen with a whole bunch of writting but it goes to fast to read. then it will restart and bring me to a page that says your computer hasnt been shut down right or something and theres options of safe mode, safe mode with networking, last config or normal. when i chose last config everything works fine. but this happens pretty much every time i start up my machine. does anyone know how to fix this?

and id like to add that its windows xp home edition.

OK, next time you've got into Windows OK, you need to turn off automatic reboot after BSOD (the blue screen you see flash up contains some useful information).
To do this, go to the Control Panel, then double click on the System icon (if you have My Computer on your desktop, right click on this and then select Properties, does exactly the same. As yet another alternative, you can press the Windows key and Pause key at the same time - all get you to where you need to be)
Go to the Advanced tab, click on "Startup and Recovery" then make sure that "Automatically reboot" is unchecked.

Next time the system crashes, it will stop on the blue screen (also known as BSOD - the Blue Screen of Death) - write down some of the details at the top of the screen and post them back here. The information you post will help us work out why Windows is crashing.

Rgds
AndyF

STOP: 0x00000050 (0xF778A800, 0x00000000, 0xf7775051, 0x00000000)

PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGED_AREA

one of my main questions is: Is this "Blue screen of death" a software problem or a hardware problem. if its a software problem i should be able to just format my hard drive and everything should be fine right? i have a 2 year waranty on all of my parts and i built it about 4 months ago so im covered on both ends. just dont know how to fix it. i can get the computer started just takes a little work and i have to end up leaving it on to be able to use it everyday

There are number of things that could produce this kind of stop error - take a look at Microsoft's support pages to see if any of these problems relate to you.

Rgds
AndyF

well yesterday i got the error again and it took an hour to get my computer to fully boot. i saw that my cd burner wasnt burning and giving me errors, so since i dont use it anymore because of my dvd burner, i took it out. thats when my computer booted fully without the error. then i scaned my pc with my virus scan, adaware, spybot and i got rid of some stuff. hopefully its fine now. if i get the error again will reformating my hard drive fix it?

Formatting and re-installing Windows won't necessarily get rid of that particular BSOD, because it looks as though it could be caused by software OR hardware.
But, having said that, as long as you back up all of your important documents, it probably wouldn't do any harm just to reinstall.

Hopefully, though, the CD burner was the cause of your problems, and they won't reappear.

Let us know how you get on.

Rgds
AndyF

well today is day 2 of no errors and everything hopefully will be fine from here. if everything works for another 5 days ill mark this post solved...

ok well i got another error but my computer restarted and then i hit start normal and it just started fine....i checked device manager and thers no question marks...i can find anywhere online the error i had...anyone got anything?

Does your Event Viewer have error or warning entries?

Start->Run->"eventvwr.msc"

yes there are warning and errors on system and application...actually it says that on my startup yesterday it gave me an error because of aim still on when i shut down. aim does give me many errors. anyone know anything about this problem?

yes i have determined the problem is AIM. every single time my computer has had the BSOD error it has an error log of aim. so im gonna try to do a clean uninstall of aim and then reinstall aim and ill post back to let you know how it goes

aight i uninstalled and when i did that it gave me an option to delete this aim directory that i myself didnt create when in the initial installation. maybe that was the problem. i dont know but i deleted it and i reinstalled. ill post back if theres another error

Actually, before you go any further, do you have another stick of ram? I've seen this on my personal computer. I had 1 gig of DDR 333 memory. But, every once in awhile, I'd get that same BSOD. Then it took so a long time to get back into the OS.

I'd try the following tools: Microsoft's memory scanner, QuickTech, and Memtest 86+. Everything checked out ok.

So, I was thinking page fault...hmmm page fault...delete the page file? Nope, hmmm....I changed out the memory. So, instead of DDR 333 1 gig, I replace it with DDR 400 1 gig. I had no more problems.

actually i think i may have fixed it. at the way begining i thought it was the ram. so i took each stick out and then when i reseated all the ram it worked. so i thought i was fine. then the BSOD happened again and my cd burner wasnt working right. so i didnt need it anyway so i just took that out. since i have a dvd burner i use for everything. but then i was told on my post about eventviewer and i have to thank that guy because it told me my problem. on every day i had a BSOD it said aim had faulted on startup. so i uninstalled aim. during the uninstallition it asked me to delete this random directory which i think was the problem. i did that, reinstalled aim and im on day 3 without any problems.

Sounds interesting. Event viewer can be very helpful....sometimes...nice to hear that it is working.

i had this exact problem with a bsod and windows shutting down. had to resort to formatting windows drive and starting again. have suspicions that it might be ZoneAlarm update 5.5.062.011 that is causing this??