Blue Screen Issue

[taken]

I have an issue with my Dell Inspiron laptop. My wife bought it three years ago and for 2.5 of them it was flawless. One day about six months ago, it locked up. When restarting I got a blue screen saying "STOP: c00002221 Unknown Hard Error \SystemRoot\System32\ntdll.dll." I looked all over the internet and found a bunch of people with the same issue. Most were told they were in for a format and reinstall of Windows XP to correct the problem and that all was lost. I did find one forum suggesting to do a repair/install which I did. worked just like an upgrade and all my files and settings were preserved. I just did the Windows updates after and all was back to normal... for a week and then the same error/ bluescreen. I did the repair/install again and backed up everything right after. This time it only lasted a couple of days. The last time I tried it I thought maybe it was one of the window updates causing the issue so I didn't do them. It lasted a couple of hours. I then did a format and reinstall of Windows. I thought it was finally fixed but it only lasted a few weeks. Now, there is no point in trying again. The question is what is corrupting Windows and is it worth fixing? I thought of replacing the harddrive but then thought if the whole computer was just shot, maybe I should just toss it and upgrade to a new laptop with Vista. Seems that a $1600 laptop should have lasted longer than three years though. Any ideas what might cause this and if it's worth fixing? I would hate to spend any money on it only to have it crash again in a month or so...

 

[PC eye]

It's most likely a hardware problem being seen there since you have performed repair as well as clean installs of Windows. First knowing what the ntdll.dll helps being a system driver that controls NT core functions. Often a 3rd party program installed can cause problems with the various Windows drivers.

One guide for working the problems seen surrounding this particular file is seen at http://pcsupport.about.com/od/fixtheproblem/a/ntdlldll.htm As the artcile there points out it could very well be the drive seeing problems or even the memory installed since you have reformatted the drive ruling out any type of virus or spyware.