My computer has been working fine since i got it a couple months ago. then out of the blue it started freezing out of nowhere. i wouldn't be running anything intense but my computer would just lock up for no reason. firefox would also keep crashing for no reason. on top of that i was having all kinds of issues and all that so i decided to just format the whoel thing and start from scratch. so i format everything and only install the drivers along with some other programs. everything i had been using without any problems for months. i did get a new version of my ATI catalyst drivers (8.3) because they're supposedly much better, but unfortunately it would just lock my computer up and give me a crazy looking screen every 10 minutes. so i uninstalled and reinstalled the old one but my computer is still having the same problems as before with the computer freezing and firefox crashign and all kidns of other stuff. i honestly suspect the ati drivers are behind it all, but i just don't know. ive tried disabling things one by one but i just can't figure it out. this is driving me crazy, i just got this computer, it's brand new. please help me out guys.

Suggestion.

Go into the Device Manager and delete the Display Adapters device.
Reboot and let Vista reinstall the device.

Uninstall or disable?

I need to have the driver though or it doesn't work properly.

You know, I don't even think it could be the driver. I have the old one installed which I've been using for months without problems.

None of this makes sense! Arghhh!

Alright. Its a hardware problem. I formatted again and installed nothing, yet my computer keeps getting a blue screen and restarting as soon as i log in. Now, which piece of hardware would it be? Is it even possible to figure that out? I cant see the error message either. God, this sucks. Brand new $2000 computer and it dies in less than a month.

EDIT: Ok, I pulled it out, vacuumed all the dust and set all the fans to high speed and now it seems to be doing ok. Before it would get the blue screen immediately and restart, but it's been running for a good hour or so without any problems yet. I don't know if this solved the problem though, because before it would just lock up and I'd have to restart myself. That doesn't sound like a heat problem to me. Neither does the weird looking screen thing or all the program crashes.

your processer could be overheating......

Ok well my computer was running perfectly all day and night, no freezes or crashes. when i got home today my computer was still on but i couldnt get anything to come on the monitor, so i pressed the restart button. now my computer just does an infinite cycle- it starts up for a few seconds thren immediately shuts down, then it starts up and then shuts down. i dont understand what's going on...

On the screen it says 'Scanning BIOS IMage in Hard Drive' - 'BIOS Auto-Recovering......'

Had to pull the plug for a few minutes to fix that. Now it gives me this error every other time when starting up and it says something about bios checksum error when starting up. I got it to start up somewhat normally but my video drivers weren't working. So then I shut it down and restarted and when I eventually got back in it was working again. Then 10 minutes later, the whole computer locks up and the screen turns all crazy again like it was doing before.

Wow.

By the way, it's not overheating. I've been monitoring the heat and it's been fine.