I know what you're thinking - isn't BSOD a software thing. Well, a colleague here has a Packard Bell netbook, which I believe is a "Dot SP110" off the top of my head. It's Atom "powered" (if you can call it that) and last night it spontaneously spacked out and rebooted during music playback in WMP11. iTunes is not even installed and the machine is less than 6mths old. Running Win 7 Starter. Following repeated reboots, I can't get it into Safe Mode with Networking, as it hangs when loading "CLASSPNP.SYS". Got into safe mode yesterday and asked it to run a CHKDSK on boot, since then it has been in a perpetual cycle of checking, then rebooting, then checking. Windows seems a distant memory.

Out here, we have no OS disc, recovery media, or anything else and to top it off, I'm getting repeated BSODs of 0x00000051. After a Google session I feel none the wiser. I'm starting to think either hdd failure, or some sort of heat issue or something (based on the spontaneous nature of the occurrence of the problem). Any other ideas?

When you start the machine have you tried pressing either ALT + F10 or ALT + F11 to see if there is a hidden repair menu?

Nope! Thanks, I'll try that. What would you expect to see on said menu?

Found it. Thanks.

After several hours of fiddling, I've managed to get to the Packard Bell "factory reset" software thingy. Now have a working desktop to reinstall all the updates and software etc. Joy.