repeated Blue Screen crashes, physical memory dump, WTF ?!

[dummy]

Hi all, I'm scared. I've had this T43 for about a year. Over the last two days I had three system crashes: a blue screen appears briefly, then I'm immediately prompted to the login screen, without reboting. The only thing I have time to read on the blue screen is "physical memory dumped". On one of the three occasions the system went into IBM Rescue or something instead of prompting the login.

What should I do? I've already backed up all my data. I scanned for viruses etc with PC-Cillin.

I'm afraid the disk or something might die. How do I create an image of the system so that I can recover all the installed programs should I have to replace the disk?

thanks a lot.

[dummy]

ps.
I checked some logs.
On the system log I get a bunch of warnings like this:

\Device\ACPIEC: The embedded controller (EC) hardware returned data when none was requested. This may indicate that the BIOS is incorectly trying to access the EC without syncronizing with the OS. The data is being ignored.

In the applications and security logs I don't see anything special.

[FTC]

Hi,

The easiest way is to make an image of the disk into a USB drive. Use something like Symantec Ghost, Drive Image or Drive Snapshot...

But I would say most probably your problem is memory or hard drive related. Both components can be easily replaced. I would first of all check hard drive SMART status with a tool such as diskcheckup, hdtemp or NHC, to make sure you can still trust on your disk ... If the disk is OK then verify the memory with memtest or similar... or just by swapping modules with other known good ones.

All the utilities mentioned can easily be located with google. The disk imager programs are all commercial products though, but even in this case at least for drive snapshot there is a trialware restriction free license valid for 30 days... and it is a *very small* download (just 200K).

[dummy]

Thanks for your suggestions, I'll give them a try.
Today I de-fragmented the hard disk and everything went smoothly, and had no further crashes...

[dummy]

ps. is the trial version of Norton Ghost fully functional? (I mean, can I create and save an image?)