Rope's end, my friends. Rope's end...

[Ronixis]

Hello wonderful TS community, who I hope can help me resolve a problem with Windows XP home edition.

Well, it all started one day, my computer froze while several programs were running. I waited a while and nothing happened, and so, without much of a choice, I had to manually shut it down. Afterwards, when I restarted windows, it gave me the "We're sorry for the inconvenience..." screen, no option given would allow windows to start up, not even safe mode. What happens is, is that it starts up normally, gets past the Windows Logo with the progress bar, and right before the username list screen it hangs with a black screen and active white arrow. I figured the recovery option in the windows CD would help, so I used that, and yet, it STILL does the same thing, but now it takes a little longer to get to the black screen and arrow. I honestly don't want to reformat, though it's looking to be that way, so, any ideas?


Thanks in advance

 

[raybay]

The most common causes are failing hard drive or failing memory module. Can also be a failing modem, NIC, Audio card, bad CPU fan, or a failing power supply... as well as overheating from dirt and pet hair jammed around the heatsinks.
If you have some miles on this unit, you should look at the hard drive first... and a little over a year and a half ago, a lot of bad drives were sold by Maxtor and Western Digital that resulted in similar problems in fairly new machines... particularly Dell, and HP. If it is an eMachines, that is a common symptom of an early failure that will only get worse and is probably not fixable.
Let us know your system specs.

 

[Ronixis]

K, it's abit hard to recall, since I'm just now getting around to fixing it, but if I do remember it's not really a new computer, had it about 4 years now...anywho... It's a gateway with an intel celeron processor 2. something ghz, 756mb ram and about 30+gigs on the HD. That's all I can really remember if that's any help at all.

 

[raybay]

It has all the info on a label on the back. The model and a serial number.

 

[Ronixis]

Model No. MFATXNIN NMZ 300S CEL

Serial No. 0029465032