XP troubles

February 23, 2005 8:10 PM

Windows keeps crashing....[come inside and watch me melt down....]
posted by szg8 to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Response by poster: I am running an older HP Pavilion. P3-500. 384 K ram.

Its running XP SP 1. (Never did get around to upgrading to SP2)

Here's the problem, last night the computer worked and today it will not boot. I get the main XP screen, and the little green thing starts going across the screen. At some point it stops and locks up.

I have tried booting it normally again, booting it with last known settings that worked, and finally restored it to a week ago. None worked.

I have booted in safe mode, ran all the spyware stuff and scanned with norton antivirus. Nothing comes up.

I have scanned my hard drives for errors. Nada.

And, nothing about my system should have changed from yesterday. I didn't download anything. I didn't update any programs. I checked my email account and shut down normally.

This has happened before, but not in a while. The last time it happened, I went through my registry and startup programs and removed anything that even looked offensive (one by one) and determined that the autoboot on my Norton Antivirus was causing the problem. When I turned off autostart, everything went back to normal. And until today I hadn't had a problem since last October.

Any ideas?
posted by szg8 at 8:23 PM on February 23, 2005

Last time something remotely like that happened to me, the problem was an outdated/corrupt motherboard driver set (there was some 4-in-1 driver set for, I think, Via chipsets, but it's been so long...).

Have you tried booting in verbose mode to see where it hangs? (I think you hit F8 - frantically and repeatedly since there are no cues that you're supposed to do this - at boot and choose verbose mode.) Does XP still have verbose mode? :)
posted by socratic at 8:39 PM on February 23, 2005

Yeah, there might be a hardware problem. Can you get a decent hardware diagnostics package and run some tests?
posted by grouse at 1:21 AM on February 24, 2005

Response by poster: I will try both of those suggestions....
posted by szg8 at 6:06 AM on February 24, 2005

Response by poster: A system restore to two weeks ago worked.

I don't know why that one worked and the one from a week ago didn't work.

Everyday the macometer leans more towards a new mac and away from my pc....
posted by szg8 at 7:39 AM on February 24, 2005