foolygoofy26

Hi

I bought a custom build computer on 2004. It worked find then. It had XP Pro until Genuine came out. I put the computer a side as my dad bought a new computer and the custom was left a side just for gaming due to the RAMs and Video card. A month ago I moved and reformated the hard drive and installed windows XP home (A Genuine copy)...then the problems came.

Installing XP home was a mission since the computer would freeze when the computer was reformation or copying files. After the 12 try finally I was able to install XP. Then the second problem came when restaring the computer. I need to have the XP CD in the drive in order for XP to load, if not I would get an error that the Disk can not be found.

After getting all the XP updates the USB ports (2 ports) that worked before with my Sony digital camera and my web cam it would not work. In the past I would just plug in and one plug would tell it was not a 2.0 but everything would work. Now I get the message on both ports, but I can not get the cams to work.

The final frustuation came after installing a game (Jane's F-15) and the game would freeze after 10 minutes. I installed another game (Rise of Nations) and I would get the same. The computer doesn't freeze with anything else but games. There has been 2 other times that it has frozen on the screen saver (XP My Pictures Slide Show). With these freeze nothing works, no mouse, no keyboard, you press num lock or caps and the lights just stay on.

Any body familiar with this?

The Sytem:
Intel P3.
2.0GHz
768MB SDRam 133
80GB HDD
nVidia 256MB Video card

Notes:
When the system froze installing XP and I would try again and again it would usually freeze at the same place(Done with the reformat settings and ready to install XP). If I would turn the system off for a couple of hours, it would then go further on the installation.

Thanks.

PC eye

After sitting around for the amount of time you have mentioned here the hard drive would have a high degree of file and partition information loss and fragmentation. A drive utility for writing binary "0"s to a drive would first clean the drive completely of the other version of XP. being that the release of the XP Pro "Genuine" may have been newer then your copy of the home edition installation problems would come up from that.

Another item to be concerned with is the need for a battery replacement. The 2032 Lithium battery would be one item needed for maintaining the programming of the bios. One popular program for cleaning a hard drive is called Kill DIsk found at http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm

With a system sitting around for lengthy periods of time it becomes a dust and dirt collector. A good can of air cleaner would be useful in blowing out the pci and memory slots as well as the case in general. Static from debris can interfere with normal functions of installed hardwares as well as having a tendency to lift things up in their slots like video and sound cards along with the memory modules. A bios update if available would be another thing to look into.

foolygoofy26

Thanks for your help...I clean up with air the machine and updated the drivers around. There was a lot of dust in there. I haven't gotten to use the kill disk because I'm not willing to go thru the whole window installation and reinstallation of all my programs...but I'll keep it in mind for my next machine that will be built out of 2 used hard drives

PC eye

One other idea besides the Kill Disk utility for deleting a partition off of a drive as well as creating new one even custom sized is a Linux partitioning tool known as the Gnome Partition Editor or more commonly known as GParted. Here's a brief description of the free Linux utility.

Partitioning Bliss with GParted

Do you fancy keeping those MP3s into their own partition? Want to copy data residing in one disk onto another? Crave for an easier way to mirror partitions? Long for a simple solution to reorganize your disk and create space for a new Linux distribution? Look no further, GParted (http://gparted.sourceforge.net) will do all this and much more. And did I mention, all this, keeping your keyboard finger-free?


GParted or GNOMEPartitionEditor is an excellent tool that simplifies the challenging process of partitioning. While experienced users of Open Source Software may find various uses for GParted, for me it will always be a newbie's wonder tool. The partitioning step turns away several new users wanting to install a Linux distribution on their box unless one lets the distro take over the entire hard disk, which isn't always feasible. GParted will enable such users prepare their disks for a Linux install.

You can download GPart free at http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...kage_id=173828 Since it will be a cd burnable iso9660 type disk image the free version of BurnOn has seen some great results lately and can be found at http://www.burnworld.com/burnoncddvd/