I have a relatively new (Aug '05) Sony Vaio S460 that has a nasty habit of crashing. It follows a relatively predictable pattern in that it will crash soon after powering up, displaying a blue screen for a split second, before restarting. Afterwards, it is stable for days.

There is no apparent cause that I can discern. Sometimes it crashes at the login screen, almost immediately after powering up. Other times i'll have firefox open for a good hour before it blows. I haven't added any new hardware or software. It has done this out of the box (the situation was such that I couldn't return it to the place where i bought it).

I've run Microsoft's memory test utility overnight and it failed to find a problem.

Occasionally, it will freeze on the blue screen. The error from one of those times was :

0x00000D1 0x995D41E0 0x00000002

The errors aren't the same from what i've noticed. Most of the time the blue screen is visible for less than 1/2second, not enough time to get the error.

What perplexes me is the crash/stable dynamic. What could possibly cause it?

Thanks ever so much!