Well I've had my computer unplugged for about a month, and finally I'm hooking it back up (but not without problems - my monitor wasn't working but that's another issue). Anyways, since my monitor wasn't working I definately hit the restart/power button several times out of frustration. Now that I've gotten it working, I have an entirely different problem. My computer starts up, does the normal motherboard word thing, then says the following: I have no idea what has happened. I didn't add any new hardware, the only thing that really changed is I'm not connected to the internet, I probably pressed the power button a few times. So I made attempts to use safe mode, start windows normally and last known good configuration. All begin to open windows, then I get a blue screen with some writing, then it goes to the mobo screen again and repeats the same thing over. So if anyone has any ideas, that would be great.
The only thing that i can think of that might have changed would be atmospheric... so check inside the pc, how dusty is it? etc
Well, if you run step by step confirmation (which may only be in XP pro) You can at least figure out where windows is crashing. Your looking at a lot of possible problems, but the most common are A. a missing windows component, or B. Windows failing when it tries to load some driver for a piece of hardware which is faulty. Definitely as always you'll want to run it with as many things removed as possible. Try and boot it with everything removed that you don't strictly need(Sound card, cd drive, things like that) and if you can get it to run, start adding those things back, and trying to boot it again, seeing if you can pinpoint the problem. Then again, your installation may have been damaged by a virus, and I'm not sure exactly what you would be able to do about that, short of reinstalling.
Yes, always memtest. If you don't have a disk with memtest I recomend getting some kind of linux bootdisk (I prefer gentoo) because even running a strictly windows environment, there are a lot of useful tools on there that help diagnose problems.
That is a problem commonly solved by running a WXP repair ans could be caused by the several improper shut downs(corrupted files, data loss, etc) . Do you have your original XP CD?
