I have a Dell laptop which was having hardware problems these past two days. When it was powered on, it would try and start Windows 7, fail and then freeze during the repair procedure. I tried running the Dell built-in diagnostics with the F12-key as the computer was starting. Two or three minutes into the Memory test, the screen went blank and eventually froze.
I tried booting with my Linux CDs and one of them successfully booted and ran, but no other CD ran.y
I tried changing the BIOS settings to their default values and this didn’t help. Next, I tried removing the battery and a different power supply which made no difference. The laptop still shuts down and freezes after a few minutes.
My hunch was the Memory or RAM was the problem so I removed one of the memory sticks and nothing changed. I replaced the first one back in the laptop and took out the second one. Now things changed forthe better because the laptop stayed on and never shut down until I powered it down properly. The problem memory stick was examined and it was different than the one in the laptop. I found another stick identical to the one in the laptop and put it in the open slot and the laptop runs like a champ now.