Getting blue screen of death - looking to locate harware problem

[tbarb]

I am suddenly experiencing 2-4 'blue screens of death' a day on a 6 year old Pentium core duo machine that was made for trading with good components at the time. The blue screen comes up with a full screen of text which is too much to read over the half second it displays, and then the machine reboots.

For 6 years it has run only one application (TradeStation) and the Norton Security that downloads from Comcast. It is a demanding program.
It's an aging computer, of course, and being replaced; but if the cause was a video card or memory stick they are economically and easily replaced, and I have another lessor stressful job it could do.

The first blue screen came up a few weeks ago but would occur only once a week, but suddenly I am getting 2-4 a day. I cannot read the error message because the blue screen only displays for a fraction of a second; but what I have been able to discern over several blue screens is " an unrecoverable hardware error" and the line that shows (presumably the location), changes showing sometimes one or two and sometimes 3 to 4 long locations (presumably memory errors?).

What I am wondering is how I can find a log or something and look closer at the error, maybe google it and find out what hardware is causing it.

Any suggestions?
Many thanks,
Tom

 

[scout_03]

this to stop auto restart http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windows7/ht/automatic-restart-windows-7.htm and this one to check dump files in plain text http://www.resplendence.com/whocrashed

 

[faalin]

if your running windows 7 you can click Start and then in the search field type event log

 

[tbarb]

Viewed the event log (typing it into windows 10 brought it up), and there are so many entries I cannot tell what might be the offender causing the blue screens and reboots. I will wait for the next crash and see if one of the entries just occurred. There are many "service control errors" and "kernel-general" errors', but too many for the number of crashes I have had

Some times when the computer reboots it deletes my internet connection. The cable connection is gone in the network and sharing center (win 7) and I have to delete the wireless connection as it won't connect (usually greyed out) and manually reboot again to connect. That made me think the offending hardware may be the network adapter (on the motherboard), but then again the disconnection on the reboot only occurs 25% of the time, and it may or may not the real issue.

 

[scout_03]

memtest ram and use the hdd software maker to test it you could have bad sector .

 

[tbarb]

Thanks for posting the above suggestions. Seems I am only getting very general things in the log and too many that I cannot tie to a specific hardware item so I will probably cut my losses.