NZFF

For the last year or so my Dads computer (now running xp home sp2, upgraded from sp1) has been crashing on start up. It would get to "Welcome" screen and half swith off i.e. the fan stops and the monitor turns off. I suspect some other things turn off as well but i can't see them. He has a "HP Pavillion 501a desktop" only upgrading the os(because of this problem) adding a dvd writer and we gave him our old 512mb stick of RAM(1gb in total for him) and 2 new hard drives(one he got when he got his pc for back up, he got the other one yesterday 'cos he thought that was the problem) It used to take 4 or 5 times of trying to boot up before it finally worked. Now It won't even get into windows. I did a fresh install last night and the problem wasn't evident for 5 minutes which gave me enough time to get the video drivers(we were dumb enough to delete the recover partition, who would know you had to make your own recover disks???????) then It crashed like normal but while windows was running. Then the time before it crashed went down a few minutes each time until it was back at the begining.

Please help as much as you can, I want the worst to come to the worst (so he get a machine that can play games ), but if something can be done please post because he has something else wants to save up for like a big TV.

Hope this makes sense
James

James you tell your dad to get one of these, with a 30" monitor, which is any day as good as a big TV.

LOL!!! anyway he told me to reinstall and guess what, it crashes on install as well!!! so I sure hes goiing to get a new machine now, we aren't letting him and my mum use our machine!!

Could be a bad ram chip take the old 512mb out and see how you go

Sounds to me like a ram chip, or the harddrive. Must be time for a new computer

Thanks guys. Not sure if it is the RAM because there were troubles before that RAM was installed and removing it had no effect.

YUSSSS!!! He's getting a new computer, time for my brother and I to get some second copies of games!!