XP locks up, and I'm out of things to try

[vinturella]

Computer problems…


A couple of days ago my computer, a P3 running Windows XP, began to lock up on almost every application. I ran a virus scan, spybot, and adaware, without any effect. System restore locks up. I reinstalled XP, which seemed to go well, but had no effect.


I then tried to reinstall Office XP, but it would almost immediately give me the message “Error opening log file – verify that the specified log file location exists and that you can write to it.” It did not tell me where it is looking. Log files are in my documents/local settings and my initial install had no problems. System.ini on the cd seems to be looking for \\officeserver\logfiles.


Word now pops up on its own with the message “saving the auto recovery file is postponed for normal.” Trying to open any file gives “locked for editing,” then “the document or path is not valid.

When I use task manager to try to unlock, I usually have several copies of dumprep.exe running and taking up the resources.

It was running perfectly two days ago, and I don’t think I downloaded anything that would be suspect. Any ideas? Thanks.

John, jbv@jbv.com

 

[Perris Calderon]

try a memory diagnostic

I don't think this is it because of the error messages, whcih I haven't seen before, but this is a good start

others will chime in who might have seen those errors.

welcome to this board

 

[Red]

"I reinstalled XP, which seemed to go well, but had no effect. "

Did you format, or install over an old version?

That would pretty much confirm that there is somesortof hardware problem, seems like a harddrive or RAM problem to me, start knocking out un necessairy pieces of hardware to further diagnose the problem..

Sounds like a bad harddrive to me, a bad sector or something.
what kind of harddrive do you have? go to their website and try download some sortof diagnositc tool, i'm not sure if that's what perris was referring to, but yeah, probably the best bet.

if you've got another harddrive, try that. if you've got on-board video, try that. remove disk drives / rom drives, and try booting in safe mode. see where that gets you

good luck!


my post count was cleared.. what the..?

 

[Maveric169]

Are you OC'ing your pc? You get allot of instability with overclocks gone wrong even if stable prior.

 

[Red]

Good call, didn't even think about that one...

Could be a ram problem too... try take that out, if you've got two sticks do one at a time... heh

 

[Krux]

cpu could be over heating open your case up and check your heat sink for dust build up I had this problem with my computer a few weeks ago I pulled a sheet of dust and lint off the top of my radiator that looked like it came out of a lint trap in a dryer.