Posted by Gunther Gloop on 10/03/06 11:09

(I know the following belongs in a "more expert" group, but I much prefer
asking the opinion of people who don't spend a good deal of time reading
this kind of thing -it can lead to snottiness of the worst sort in my
experience. I'd rather self-destruct than suffer those comic-book-guy
taunts.)

Anyway (look away now if you don't want to read PC-woes)...

I reinstalled XP around 2 months ago (in a seperate directory on the same
C:), following a crash & system-files corruption.

Since then I've been having problems with my usb ports -they work, then
don't intermittently. I bought a 4-port usb pci-card. That works -but
sometimes peripherals aren't "picked up" until I unplug them after booting,
then slot them back in. !

But to cap it all... I'm getting seemingly-random system crashes!
I could be merrily typing away (on this post even -so I'm regularly saving
to the Drafts folder as I go) when suddenly -BLACK SCREEN... System reset...
back to boot-up (all without my intervention).

For the past few weeks I've been getting roughly 1-per day. This morning
I've had 2 already!
There seems to be no common thread -although for some (perhaps unrelated)
reason, Firefox also crashes very regularly -which doesn't cause a system
crash, I just have to restart that prog.


A few months back I replaced my graphics card with a (fanless) Gigabyte
Nvidia GeForece6600. I'm thinking that it's _possible_ these faults
(including the initial crash that caused corruption) has something to do
with that... but since I no longer have the older card, I can't easily
check/replace it now.
These crashes don't only happen when the unit is "overheating" though -I
haven't done anything to cause any real 'graphics-intense' work in the past
while... mainly for fear of crashing.


My "hope" is that these problems are all caused by some corrupt system files
that I didn't get rid of on my last system reinstall (actually, I installed
as a seperate operating system on the same drive if I remember
correctly -don't ask why- for a while I was getting the option of 2 boot
OSes, with only the new one working of course).

I do intend to get a loan of another graphics card. Also, probably reinstall
Windows (and suffer calls to Microsoft to reActivate).
But in the meantime, I was hoping someone might have other suggestions...
good 'system-clean' apps, registry switches to check, plugholes to fill,
etc. ?

Any help much appreciated,

-Kevin.


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