A confusing situation....

[hannasus]

Ok, this may have an obvious answer, but I'm fairly ignorant about this sort of stuff....

I installed windows xp a couple of months ago after my brother raved how much better it was than the (less than perfect) windows nt that I had before. So, everything was going fine, but recently my computer has been restarting itself for no reason.....quite often when I'm in the middle of an important piece of coursework.....v annoying. Also from time to time the screen flickers for a few seconds when I'm on the internet.

What does it all mean? Anything to do with xp? Or is it a virus?

Should mention that my computer is about 6 years old, fairly slow and I think it struggles to run on xp....poor baby.

All help appreciated!

 

[viper275]

Were there system requirements on the XP box or at this link: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...421?v=glance&s=software&n=507846&vi=tech-data ? It could be that your computer doesn't meet the requirements. That doesn't explain why it worked up until now, so it could be a virus, but my guess is there isn't enough RAM (how long did it work fine?) There's some way to change the settings to use less, I think.

 

[The Person]

Should mention that my computer is about 6 years old, fairly slow and I think it struggles to run on xp....poor baby.

That should be the reason why. Six years old... viper275 summed it up nice, though.

 

[Jeratain]

Like the two above said, 6 years old is a mighty old system to be running XP. It's doable, but not recommended. XP will improve performance on systems that meet the minimum requirements, but wont always outperform certain other operating systems because of the various services it performs.

Also you may want to consider how you installed it. Did you install XP as an upgrade over your previous version of Windows or did you do a fresh format and install? If you install over an older version, you can run into bugs and it will seem sluggish; whereas a fresh install will be far better.

Did you update Windows with all the patches and service packs? If not, you may be experiencing some kinks that are fixed by those patches.

If your system is old, you should probably consider downgrading to an older version of Windows.

 

[Thrawn]

A friend of mine once had his computer rebooting itself for no reason at all. Nothing seemed to trigger it, it would just restart. Turned out to be a problem with the BIOS settings. He reset those to their defaults and everything was fine.

I can never remember how to get into the BIOS though.

 

[Neomega]

press delete when re-booting