Had trouble with this laptop for months now. Seems to intermitantly die/freeze/crash on me. Either it freezes and you have to reboot and then it does consistancy check etc or big blue screen and memory dump! Anyway, recently sent it back to dell and its come back and they say they cant find anything wrong, so I have just rebuilt it using their discs this time, so far no probs, but I have just noticed that there are 4 default monitors in device manager. This happened before I rebuilt it and I was just wondering whether this could be causing my crashes? Has anyone else seen these default monitors cause them probs like this? I have searched forums and seen that a couple of monitors is not unusual, but just wondering whether mine could be a fault with a driver or hardware. Graph card = ATI Radeon

No, multiple monitors in Device Manager will not cause your system to crash, I'm not sure why it happens, but it's perfectly normal, I have one plug n play and two default monitors listed. The three major causes of crashes are..... 1) Driver trouble (not likely in your case as you're using the Dell recovery disks). 2) Bad memory (RAM), easiest way to test this is to download Memtest86. 3) Overheating of your h/ware (you should have temperature readings in your BIOS, 20 - 35 degrees C for system temp, and 20 - 50 degrees C for processor are good readings. Anything above that and you're looking at crashes. ******************************************** Right-click My Computer, then properties, then advanced, then on Startup and Recovery settings. Make sure "Write an event to the system log" is checked, apply and exit. This will force Xp to write an error statement in your Event Viewer, which you can then use to gain more information about the problem. If this option was ALREADY enabled, you can goto Control Panel, Admin Tools, then Event Viewer. Try to remember the last time this happened, then scroll down to entries around that date/time, you will find an error message which will give you more detail. You can then either post the info back here, or take it to the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

Many thanks for the detailed response. I'll try some of this out. I think perhaps the reason that I considered this might be causing the crashes was that on another computer i noticed in device man a similar thing with a scanner detecting itself several times was causing a computers resources to go sky high and eventually hang. Thanks again.