Crashing... or something

[Arenennas]

Hello! My laptop seems to be having some problems. Every week or so, it will restart itself and then be unable to start back up. It begins to boot, but then gets stuck at the "loading your personal settings page" or restarts itself again before it even gets to that point. The only thing for it (that I've found) is to do a system restore. I've done virus scans but haven't found anything; I was told this might be a hardware issue. It is kind of an old laptop, but I'd like to limp it along a little longer. Any ideas?

 

[raybay]

Tell us the laptop brand and model, configuration, and software installed.
If it is using a hard drive that is three years old, the hard drive may have begun its end of useful product life. We need to know more about the sytem, before we can make useful comments.

 

[Arenennas]

It is older than three years- I bought it in 2005 in my first year of college. It is a Gateway MX3228 with Windows XP.

 

[almcneil]

There are many different causes for this, both hardware and software.

The first and easiest to check are the BIOS settings. Go into BIOS and reset to defaults. Restart and see if the problem still happens.

Repost with results.

-- Andy