Weird Booting Issue

[Mateo2008]

Hey Tech Friends,

I'm hoping someone can give me a hand with this pretty rookie issue I'm having.

TYPE OF PC - HP Pavillion desktop

THE PROBLEM STARTED - when I attempted to look at the reason why most of my cpu space was being used up upon start up so I did the following >
> Ctrl Panel > system > performance > advance > settings > and I must have changed some of the settings under "processor Scheduling" or "Memory" or something because since then I'm having the following issues/symptoms.

SYMPTOMS
- My PC keeps wanting to check the disk space/drives or whatever when I turn it on.
- It sometimes shuts down for no reason when I'm trying to open up bigger programs.
- I keep getting duplicate emails sent to my outlook inbox.

I know I must sound like such a rookie, and I'm sorry to bug you guys but does anyone know what might be causing this ?

I've tried going in and trying to un-do what I did but I must be doing something wrong, also, I really don't wanna lose any info in my hard drive by doing a system restore etc...

Any ideas guys ?

Your kind assistance is greatly appreciated.

Regards
Mateo2008

 

[Fragrant Coit]

It sounds suspiciously like a faulty Hard Drive, but a System Restore would be a good starting point. You won't lose any EMails, documents or anything.

If the Restore doesn't fix it, find out what brand of Hard Drive you have & run the appropriate Diagnostic.
https://www.techspot.com/vb/topic7602.html

If it fails, it's time for a new Hard Drive, fresh install of Windows etc.

If it passes, get back to us.

 

[Samstoned]

the 1st problem of cpu usage indicates virus ,spyware or some corrupt driver software issue
and 2nd if you tampered with settings now another problem maybe you disabled paging
3rd when machine shuts off during write can cause hard drive file corruption then scandisk wants to run and check try to fix errors
since ,from the sound of it you don't know much about your machine I would back up what you can and re-install xp
double emails indication of spyware virus,not always
you send the 1st one the virus sends the 2nd with infected file

Little edit
all machines run cpu up to 100% on start, even when your starting a program ,once the os is running it may peg 100%