Repeated crashing during startup, even in safe mode

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hello there-

I'm trying to figure out if there's anything i can try to do for myself before i take my computer in for professional resuscitation.
i'm running windows xp on a gateway profile 5000 (all in one) that was new in the summer of '04 and thus is hugely antiquated now. i upgraded my ram several months ago so i'm now on 2gb (it's been working fine for months since the upgrade so i doubt that's it...)

a few days ago, my computer randomly crashed. i haven't installed anything lately, no new hardware or programs or downloads or anything. i figured i'd just overtaxed the poor thing and restarted it. everything worked fine.

i ran an AVG scan just in case, and it came up clean.

last night it randomly crashed again, and this time, when i restarted it, it got to the windows logo screen and crashed again. i started it again, and got a screen asking how i wanted to start. i picked "last known good configuration". everything started up and was back to normal.

this morning it crashed yet again, but now when i restart it, there's no screen coming up asking which configuration to use. there's no error screen, no BSOD, nothing. it just gets to the windows logo page and powers down.

what scares me is that i tried to start in safe mode, and it crashed just the same.

in the past i've had my computer stuck in an infinite reboot cycle, but this time it's just crashing and staying down. i've been nosing about online, and a couple places have suggesting putting in the xp cd and restarting that way, but my cd drive has been dead for about a year now, so that's out.

i live in florida, so i doubt that the problem is my computer being too cold. no recent installs or anything, as i mentioned. i have AVG set to auto-scan once a week, and ran it the other night as well. i haven't run spybot or ad-aware in the past few weeks, but i try to keep things pretty tidy.

any ideas or suggestions? i'm not afraid to try things on my own, but when i can't get it to start up, even in safe mode, i'm at a bit of a loss.

any help would be hugely appreciated!

-lari
 
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