Windows crash question

[yiannakop]

Hi everyone. I keep having my home pc crashing under win xp. I formated hard disk and reinstalled win xp but still the problem occurs. To be more particular, when tha crash occurs, the taskbar is simply dead and inactive to any mouse press (the windows respond to the mouse press but very slow). Any ideas???

[S_M_A]

I assume that you re-wrote master-boot sector so virus should not be the issue? Then it's only hardware left... disk, memory or CPU. Have you checked CPU temperature, maybe it's bad cooling and temperature protection is kicking in?

[yiannakop]

Thanx for the reply. I checked for viruses using NOD32. I also checked RAM using the memory check utility of Microsoft. No problem was found. Finally, the temperature of the CPU and the motherboard seems find. Maybe some other kind of hardware failure which I cannot think... :mad:

[PeejAvery]

Can you describe the crash? Is it is just randomly rebooting, you are probably battling dead capacitors. You can check to see if the heads of the capacitors are bulged and possibly corroded.

[yiannakop]

Can you describe the crash? Is it is just randomly rebooting, you are probably battling dead capacitors. You can check to see if the heads of the capacitors are bulged and possibly corroded.
Thanx again. No it is not rebooting. At some point, the taskbar does not respond at all. The last time it happened I opened the task manager (which of course can be done only by using the keyboard, since the taskbar does not respond), and I show that explorer.exe was not responding. But I just saw it the last time, so I am not sure that this is the point in general. After I killed the not-responding process, the taskbar started responding again.

[PeejAvery]

I would suggest using Process Explorer (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/ProcessExplorer.mspx) to figure out what is causing explorer.exe to hang.

Well, if explorer.exe is the cause, you could try reinstalling SP2. But if it is something causing explorer.exe to fault, then you should try for viruses and spyware. Most people already run antivirus but a good freeware application is Grisoft AVG (http://free.grisoft.com/doc/avg-anti-virus-free/lng/us/tpl/v5). And when it comes to spyware no one application can get rid of all of them. I highly recommend a combination of three.

Spyware Terminator (http://www.spywareterminator.com)
Spybot Search & Destroy (http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html)
Ad-aware (http://www.download.com/Ad-Aware-SE-Personal-Edition/3000-8022_4-10045910.html?part=dl-ad-aware&subj=dl&tag=top5)

[dglienna]

What happens in Safe Mode?