Can anyone help please ?

I seem to be experiencing random crashing, that is, sometimes my machine runs perfectly fine for hours, and then totally unexpectedley crashes on me.

I have tried various disk clean up utilities (from microsoft to CCleaner), but nothing seems to work. I seem to be trying in vain.

Some time ago I had to reinstall windows xp pro, I'm not sure if I reinstalled it correctly !!

I am on a basic setup Pentium 4 processor 1.60GHZ 512MB

How can I tell if my memory is full ?
Should I wipe the Disk totally ?
If so how ?

Thanks for your help !!

Check your Event Viewer (Control Panel, Admin Tools, Event Viewer) and look for any Application errors around the times of the crashes. It also wouldn't hurt to check out Security, System, and Internet Explorer there and see if anything is going on around the crashes.

Provided that doesn't give you any definitive answers you should download Memtest86, you'll want to get the ISO and also burn it as a disk image, not as data.

As for checking if your memory is full, there are 2 kinds, RAM and Hard Drive. If your RAM fills up it has an alternative storage space on your hard drive called a pagefile. This is not a likely cause for your crashes. Neither is a full hard drive, although it is never a good idea to have a drive completely full for a variety of reasons but a big one would be performance. You can still check how much free space you have though by opening My Computer, finding your C drive, and right clicking on it and selecting properties. The General tab will have your used and free space as well as total capacity listed.

My guess is you have some software or driver causing the crashes. Then my second guess would be bad hardware, most likely RAM. I'd guess software/driver related first though.

Thanks for that. I have downloaded Memtest86, (reads memitest86-3.4a.iso), but can't seem to burn it from the zip folder to disk. Could you instruct me on how to do this please.

I accessed admin tools but don't comprehend the data.

Thanks for your advice.

An ISO file is not a zip folder or any thing that needs to be expanded. Some archiving utilities can open iso files which is why they are sometimes associated with them. But to burn an iso you do not touch it with anything like winzip, winrar, ace or whatever, leave it alone completely. Whatever burning software you have is what you will open the iso with. In Nero its from the Recorder menu I believe, and then Burn Image. Others will be similar. If you don't burn it that way the disk won't be bootable and then it does you no good.

I still think it is more likely you have a software issue rather than hardware, so the Event Viewer here is more pertinent. You don't have to be knowledgeable to recognise if there is a problem in there. Look for the red x marks. Look for any of those, but particularly ones around the times of the crashes. From there you can open it (double click) and see what it says, most of the time it is in plain enough english to give you an idea what is wrong. If you still can't understand paste some of them in here.

Thanks, her's what I found :

Application errors : VBR RUNTIME - VB application identified by the event source logged this application ; MSICUU : THREAD ID 1332 LOGGED

SYSTEM ERROR : E100B Adapter Intel (R) PRO/1OO VE NETWORK CONNECTION ; ADAPTER LINK DOWN

Sorry but it wouldn't let me copy and paste the errors. There are lots more.

Thanks for your time.

That one seems pretty harmless. What are some others? You can run memtest too just to rule out the RAM, but that test should be done over several hours (preferably overnight).

My suspecion initially was video drivers, if you haven't installed new ones since reinstalling XP I'd recommend you do that. Also in Windows Update check out the optional hardware drivers and see if there is one for your network card (which is that Intel 10/100 thing that you have an error on).

This one shows up quite a lot.

Source Crypt 32 :
Failed auto update retrieval of third party list sequence number from : <http//www.download.windowsupdate.com/msdownload/update/v3/static/trustedr/en/authrootseq.text>with error: The specified server cannot perform the requested operation.

Each time I try to update with microsoft the computer just crashes. Guess this is what this statement is all about ?

I will keep trying to save memtest onto disk, but each time I try to download it, it comes in zip form. What am I doing wrong ?

memtest86-34a iso 44kb - is this the right file ?

Thanks for all your help.

I figured out how to burn the program directly to disk. I see what you mean about not using it in zip form.

I will run the test overnight as instructed.

Thanks again ; I'm learning quite alot !!