Major laptop troubles - next steps?

[TomLS]

Hi all, first post from a newbie so forgive me if I leave soething out / waffle unnecessarily.
I've just started at uni, and I bought an Acer Aspire 5672WLMi (specs if needed?)

It was a very fast, capably machine and could run top-notch games at a very high quality (i.e Doom3 at top specs).
It ran perfectly for about 1 month.

I decided that I wanted some more desk space in my flat, so I ditched the TV and brought a "Freecom DVB" USB TV card from my uni shop - £31, bargain.
TV quality was great, as was the recording etc, until chortly after (like, 1-2 hrs) everything locked up and I got the blue screen of death "IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL".
Rebooted and it took 3 hrs over 3 disk checks and was back and running again.

10 minutes later the same thing happeded, but with a different message, "PFN_LIST_CORRUPT".
I had a look around on the internet when it eventually started running (but very slowly and only for about 1 hr at a time) and it seemed to suggest poorly installed drivers (which I put down to the TV card) or corrupt RAM hardware.

After attempting driver upgrades/downgrades/reinstalls for the TV card I phoned Acer, and was advised to reinstall the OS from a hidden partition.
I did this, but it STILL blued out and crashed.
I then did a full reformat with Partition magic (and changed the drive partition sizes whilst I was at it) and reinstalled again.
This time I ran various diagnostic tools before installing anything.
RAM tests came back negative for damage, Registry recovery tools came up with 120 faults and fixed them, and both virus (AVG and Norton) and Spyware (Spybot) came back negative for viruses/spyware.

It then ran fine for about 2 days, except that it wouldn't recognise the in-built webcam, or even aknowlage it was connected. Also USB devices that I used regularly without problem before the reinstall, would now not be recognized / come up as faulty. only certain devices will work on certain ports (although this could be partly to do with the crap USB hub I have).

Then yesterday the final blow came, when both video and sound became stuttery whilst playing LAN warcraft3, and then it blue screened again.
It's now very slow and reluctant, and according to task manager I'm only using 250-550MB of my 2GB of ram.
The page file is set between 3-4GB.

There are 70 running processes, but I googled them all and none are malicious, just various printer drivers and Acer installed system tools.


Sorry for the long post, but someone please help - I'm at my wits end.
I could send it back to Acer under warrantee but I'd rather do it myself so that it's not gone away for a month or however long it'll take them, as this is my one and only computer!
Also they want £38 if it's a software fault and I'm a poor student!

Regards
Tom.

[Tom]

So if you re-install Windows but NOT the tv card, do you get blue screens?

You should only really use one Virus removing program. Running more than one can cause more problems that it cures.

And from past experience, Acer only takes 5 days to complete a repair.

[TomLS]

When I installed the TV card the first time, onto a well-operating system, I used the manufacturer divers, and it cocked-up.

After the re-install, it didn't run correctly from the out-set, but I tried the card again and I let XP find the drivers for me, and it used the standard windows ones - blue screen again.

This time, I haven't installed the TV card at all, but it still blue-screens.

Sorry I didn't make that clear

That's good news about Acer, if I can't sort it soon I'll just bite the bullet and send it off.

[TomLS]

Oh and regarding the 2 virus scanners, I ran Norton, then realised the complementary subscription was expired, so I uninstalled it and installed AVG, so I wasn't running 2 at once.