Weird Pc crash

[The Viceroy]

I ran XP with 64Mb and 500Mb HD free on a P2 350 for a while, a tad slow, but it never crashed in that way.

Turn off as many services as you can anyway, as that will help.

Most likely cause is a naff driver .. did this start as soon as you installed XP, or was there some event which occured after that point (you can always use recovery if you know of a date when the system was working fine).
Was it a 95/98 update to XP??? that can cause problems with incompatible device drivers.

When you start noticing the slow down, hit CTRL-ALT-ESC and see which process is eating the processor .. if its a service, you may want to try and find out which one.

Event viewer as Skanky Burns suggests may also provide info on failed services.

[Daz]

Im kinda new to this forums, but I've somehow gotten the impression its Skanky's fault.

Anyway... maybe ist RAM? I had trouble vith PC-133 Ram cause my MB liked only PC-100. Thats something you can easily oversee...

[Rogan Josh]

I am surprised that people say that that list of programs is a minimal set for running XP. When I run ME I have only 4 or 5 processes running in the background after boot. (I am in linux at the mo so I can't check what exactly right now.)

Try doing a minimal boot (ie. switch off everything you are allowed to, including the virus checker) and see if things improve. I am guessing it will. Then turn them on, one by one, and see where the problem is.

[Zopperoni]

Perhaps your hard disk is very fragmented. Try doing a thorough defragmentation:

1) Turn off your Virtual Memory
2) Reboot
3) Run Defragmentation
4) Enable Virtual Memory again
5) Reboot
6) Run Defragmentation again

[Urban Ranger]

It could be the CPU overheating.

[Nuclear Winter]

I disabled the virtual memo
I now have 512mb ramDDR333, as said.
I am sure it is a P4, and I have the Bios patch, not SP1, going to look for it.
Also, the defrag analisys says it is not needed to run defrag...

[Rasbelin]

Okay, I'll check up again with you tomorrow, NW. So far I couldn't find anything, except for the disk caching settings which should be okay now. However I wouldn't rule out the usual problem that the user has bugged the system with plenty of extra files, no to only a few OS patches, loads of temporary files, maybe a few failed starts and no defragmentation done for ages. As for the processes, all seems pretty normal.

[Nuclear Winter]

Edit : Just happened to fail once again!
Cr/p!

[raghar]

It's because of your name Nuclear winter so your pc frozen ower.

Have you checked Directx? Your sound card drivers? Try to run Directxdiag. Do exist regcleaner for WinXP? And you could try complete check of your HD for bad sectors.


I hope you have your virtual memory on special partition or permanent.

[Urban Ranger]

Question: when do the computer crash? Randomly, or after long periods of usage?

[Zopperoni]

Originally posted by raghar
I hope you have your virtual memory on special partition or permanent.

Doesn't having the pagefile on another partition, slow down your system?

[Nuclear Winter]

Crashes more frequently when viewing many webpages at a time, or when using hi-memo programs.But sometimes it crashes at startup.

[raghar]

oups

I meant

FAT32ext c:
d:
e: special logical disk just for your swap.

Something like that.

[Zero]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
It could be the CPU overheating.

CPU overheating is correct. All dell laptop seems to show same symptoms that is descirbed. Does he have a dell inspiron btw?

[Nuclear Winter]

Nope, my cpu has 2 coolers and I checked on the PC´s auto-check and the temperature is always at 40C.
Besides, after a weird series of problems after installing SP1 (no it is not pirate, the ID check went all ok),I was forced to format my harddisk and install only windows at hand : WinME .
It still fails, with the notable diference that now programs won´t even open, that the PC crashes always I try to close a program that is not answering, that my soundcard (though driver is properly updated) is not working, and that most of the programs (with the exception of low resource ones)stop to answer when I try to open them (this includes trying to play a MP3 file on WinMediaPlayer, and Winamp 3 crashes when I try to open it).
I have checked My HD when I formated it, on another PC, and scanned it for problems with a full analysis program, and it has reported to be working very well.
Any ideas?