Freezes/restart probs

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Humbucker

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My PC has been running pretty smoothly in the last few months, I have all the 'tools' that I think keep it in good condition - Anti Virus software, Spyware/Adware progs and I do regular online virus scans, defrag pretty reguarly, I use Mozilla as my Internet Browser. In the last couple of days though my system has somehow become really unstable. I am getting regular freeze-ups, after which my PC says "The system has recovered from a serious error", blue error screens and generally lots of restart problems. I've had the restart probs for months now - if I have to restart for whatever reason I have to switch the PC off for up to 5 mins before switching it back on, otherwise it just sticks on a black screen before reaching the Windows XP writing/logo.

I downloaded and ran Tweak Now Reg cleaner(Highly recommended on download.com) earlier thinking invalid registry entries or something may be the cause of my problem but it seems that isn't the case either. If anyone has any idea of what is causing these problems that would be awesome. I'm very reluctant to either mess with any hardware inside the base unit or Reformat the hard drive so if can sort the problems out without doing either of those that would be great. BTW I'm using Windows XP Home. All help much appreciated.
 
Try this:

Right-Click My Computer/Properties/Advanced/Error Reporting/
Disable error reporting/Uncheck "But notify me when critical errors
occur"/OK/Performance->Settings/Advanced/Virtual memory->Change/Select
"No paging file"/click Set/OK/OK/OK/OK then restart.

after the restart browse to your C: drive and look for the hidden file called pagefile.sys . Once you find it, delete it.

now set it all back to what it was before.


Right-Click My Computer/Properties/Advanced/Error Reporting/
"Enable error reporting"/check marks in "windows operating system"
and "Programs"/Ok/Performance->settings/Advanced/Virtual memory->change/
Select "System managed size"/Set/OK/OK/Ok/Ok then restart again.
 
Thanks for your advice Southern Lady, Booyah I may need to follow your steps later on but I think I am nearer to finding out what my problem is. It seems to be a hardware device problem. When the PC is freezing I hear this beep beep sound from inside the base unit. Sometimes when I am restarting it takes ages on the 'scanning devices' screen. I also got an error message telling me to check my devices. I dunno if this is connected but on Thursday(the day before these problems began) I plugged my printer into the back of the base unit. I hadn't had it in for a few weeks. I couldn't plug the printer into it's usual socket on the base unit cos I have a soundcard breakout box in there, so I just put it in a purple socket(quite high up on the back of the base unit) that it fit into. Could it be this socket is unsuitable for a printer?

Also, I did a panda online virus scan and before it froze up :angry: it told me I had 13 infected files of which it only cleaned up 1. AVG and Housecall turned up nothing though. Really frustrated right now but I hope I am nearer to discovering the problem. Again, all help much appreciated with this headache.
 
Go to start, run, type msconfig, then go to startup, click disable all, reboot. See if your pc still crashes.
 
It seems to be OK at the moment, but I'll be trying some of the stuff you guys suggest if anything else happens. :)
 
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