Blue Screen of Death!

[Pae]

Rosuav, sounds like to me it is just a few corrupt bootup files. If it is consistently at the same spot it is likely not your RAM.

Do you still have your windowsxp cd? When your start your computer enter the BIOS (either DEL or one of the F keys). Set your bootup sequence to be cdrom first. Boot from the windowsxp cd and select Repair installation.

That might be a simple fix.

[Rosuav]

Pae, I'd probably agree, although there's always the possibility that there's something worse.

Ismenia, if you don't have an XP CD around, or you don't feel like playing around with it yourself, I'm sure any local geek worth his silicon will have one. If it's freezing on that black screen, you're going to need something else to boot. (It could still be very simple to fix, but it's going to be more complicated to diagnose, especially remotely.) Onto the local geek!

Everyone needs a local geek. If you can't find one any other way, just go to any gathering and ask if Chris is around. For some reason that I do not fathom, a LOT of geeks are named Chris, and a lot of Chrises are geeks. I wonder if you could sort out your problems by going to a crowded shopping center and snagging their PA system to say "Chris, can you come to Shop 42B? We have a problem with a computer." Geeks tend to be curious creatures, so it might well work.....

[Pae]

Originally posted by Rosuav
If you can't find one any other way, just go to any gathering and ask if Chris is around. For some reason that I do not fathom, a LOT of geeks are named Chris..

Come to think of it. 2 out of the 3 Chris's I know are computer geeks. Odd.

[Pae]

Before anything I would suggest getting that information off the drive (after that happens all the rest of the fixing becomes less stressful and easy). Which requires an IDE-USB converter. Most geeks will have something that will work.

If you can do that, afterwards I'd suggest just a hard reformat. Erase it all, start from scratch, and see where you can go from there.

[Ismenia]

You are all speaking "Geek" to me. He he. Since it doesn't seem to be a simple fix a non-geek can figure out, I will just find my local Chris and have him fix it.

Thanks guys!

[Vidare]

Originally posted by kestra
I would also suggest a surge protector as well for your cords.

If you're going to get a surge protector, DO NOT spend money on the cheap, $10-20 multi-outlet ones. They're set up for a single surge only. After they've been hit once, their fuse is blown and they're just another power bar. The better ones range from $40-300, and are definately worth the investment. Obviously, you don't have to go to the top end.

[Ismenia]

Well, the computer geek came out to fix my computer. Just for the record his name was Dan not Chris.

It took him an hour and a half to fix the dumb thing, so nothing I would have attempted would have helped. He wasn't quite sure what happened to it. It had some registry error issues on it, but no viruses he could find.

It is back better than now. He even put Foxfire on it for my browser, which was a discussion in another thread about Internet Explorer and its vulnerability.

Anyway.... Thanks guys for trying to help me.

[Rosuav]

Originally posted by Ismenia
It is back better than now. He even put Foxfire on it for my browser, which was a discussion in another thread about Internet Explorer and its vulnerability.

Smart move. I'm posting from Firefox right now, and it's excellent; and I have yet to come across ANY site that I have had to flick over to IE to view. (There are IE-only web sites in the world, but I've yet to find one that's actually important to me.) At times it's not the fastest thing in the world, but since I have so little experience with IE, I can't say which is faster. I do know that Chrome beats Firefox on speed, quite often, but Chrome's UI... mmm, dunno what it is about it, but I don't really like it so much, so Chrome's staying as one of my secondary browsers.

[Pae]

Originally posted by Rosuav
Smart move. I'm posting from Firefox right now, and it's excellent; and I have yet to come across ANY site that I have had to flick over to IE to view.

Windows Update requires it, and that's important.

[Rosuav]

Originally posted by Pae
Windows Update requires it, and that's important.

Yes and no. I've disabled Windows Update on a number of computers - they're running happily on SP2 (although if anyone wants to do this now, I believe SP3 would be a worthwhile enhancement) and all updates up to around about the middle of last year, and nothing since. System stability is fine, but I recommend that this be done only in a firewalled situation. On the flip side, if you are using Windows Update, that's still not really a web site. It happens to use Trident as its UI, and it is accessed over TCP/IP, but it's basically a program written in ActiveX. (FYI: Trident is the rendering engine that drives an IE window, same as Gecko is the Firefox layout engine, WebKit is Safari/Chrome, etc.)