Dell Inspiron Unresponsive After Startup?

Have you verified that the hardware is working correctly? Is the hard drive making any strange noises?

Oh I loooove these sorts of responses. I'm a bit of a troubleshooting snob, just advanced warning. If you don't follow all the instructions, you'll probably overlook something. Something that seems like me spouting off trivial nonsense could well fix the issue.. and many times I've told people - "now did you do X" them: "No but" Me "Do it.". Them: "oh now it work" . Anyways, do run HCI MemTest. http://hcidesign.com/memtest/ . It's much more thorough, or at least, fast than the MemTest86+ - it caught an error in my RAM literally within seconds of running it on my laptop, while I got through a full pass running MemTest86+ on a boot CD. Anyway, to be certain let it run overnight, and/or let MemTest86+ run overnight.

Also run WD Data Lifeguard. http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=612&sid=3 . It'll work on any brand of hard drive. Ideally it'll catch something with a Quick Test, but you MUST run the extended test to be certain - just recently I did a quick test on a desktop, it passed; then did extended and it failed. Extended test will take about 1 hour per 100 GB, perhaps longer if it's a terrible HDD (as in, lots of bad sectors).

Supposing it's not hardware- the crashing could be due to: Bad Windows 7 disk - if its really scratched, there could be read/write errors in the install. I'm not sure if converting the DVD to an ISO will give you the same MD5 as the official ISO, even if it's 100% correct.. but maybe you could try that and compare the MD5 to the official W7 MD5. Super-quick fix, run cmd.exe as Administrator, and type "sfc /scannow" (without quotes). Let it run, perhaps it'll find errors. Let it run a 2nd and 3rd time to be certain. Also run startup repair - if you constantly hit F8 at startup, it should give you a list of modes to boot into - something like "Windows Recovery" is correct. Then try to "automatically fix errors" or something to that extent. This will replace any erroneous system files.. assuming, the recovery environment isn't botched.

You could also check Event Viewer.. but it won't be tons of help unless you blue-screened and have Minidump files. And it'll probably lead you to my aforementioned suggestions. Basically, I'd put money on the issue being a bad Windows 7 DVD (or a bad DVD-RW drive - if it reads improperly), a bad HDD, or bad RAM.
Edited by jrbroad77 - 9/28/12 at 6:12pm

No way to be certain unless you can run all the diagnostics. It sound like you're still having issues. Make sure you have a 500MB or larger pagefile, turn on Minidumps for crash reporting, and download bluescreenview http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html

Minidump instructions here: http://blog.nirsoft.net/2010/07/27/how-to-configure-windows-to-create-minidump-files-on-bsod/