Blue Screen Crashes

[Raisin]

I have a Sony PCG- FX801 notebook / laptop, which I've had now for about 2-3 years. When I first got it, it occasionally crashed for no apparent reason, with a blue screen which only appeared for a fraction of a second, and I was never able to read the info on it when it happened. I learned to live with this, and after a few months it stopped happening.
Due to a disk failure last week, I recently installed a new HDD into the machine (an exact copy of what it had before) and reinstalled all the latest versions of XP, drivers etc. but now the blue screen crashes are happening all over again.
They seem to be Windows related, as when the machine is running a non-windows application (eg .games) it's fine. When the machine reboots, I get the "this has recovered from a serious failure" error message, and do I want to send a report to Microsoft? When I click "Yes", it tells me the reason for the crash was due to a device driver problem. Does anyone know how I identify the device thats causing the problem?
TIA

[rich912]

This is a problem that I encountered a few years ago on an aging notebook. The only solution that I managed to come up with, which did eventually solve the problem, is extremely time consuming. If time is no problem then give this a try.

Press F8 during the boot process and select `Safe Mode¿. Run whatever applications were causing a problem and see if the system is stable. If it is, go to Device manager and disable every `system device¿ that you can and reboot Windows normally. Re-enable the first system device on the tree, reboot and check the system for stability. If everything is OK, re-enable the next device and reboot¿¿¿continue this process until, hopefully, you find the device that is causing the problem.

In my case it was the advanced power management (APM) that caused the problem. To this day I have no idea why, but with this disabled the notebook is still functioning.