Hello everybody. I have as yet been unable to find specific help for what I have. I have a 3 year old PC that was sold with ME. It does not have DDR. Last year I installed a (legitimate) copy of XP1. (my ME was German) My XP is English. I never had any problems with ME, but have constantly had problems with XP. It crashes and crashes and crashes. Sometimes it's a Sys 32 error, and recently it has, following a period of being online but inactive, just shut down completely following a click of the mouse, and then cannot restart - it gets to the Win logo and then shuts down again. my neighbour - PC wiz, and my student ( I am an english teacher) who worked as a programmer for MS, ran diagnostic programmes, for hard and software and could not find any problems. I have reformatted and reinstalled and all is OK until Blam! it goes down again. latest reinstall - yesterday, I have avoided DL SP2 as I thought that may have soemting to do with it. Now I'm a PC idiot, so i have no idea where to start. I know this is very long, but am at my wits end. Any help or tips would be greatly appreciated.
Many thanks and kind regards.

first off, click start and rt-click on "my computer" click properties, go to the advanced tab cclick settings under "startup and recovery"
in the System failure section un-check the box that says "automaticaly restart"
click ok and ok again, the next time your computer goes off, see if you set a blue screen... if you do, jot down the title at the top and the stop error code (e.g. stop 0x000000B)

also, check your system meets all the minimum requirements for xp..
xp home: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/h...n/sysreqs.mspx
xp profesional: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/p...g/sysreqs.mspx

hope this helps,
Mike

Thanks for the info. have done as you suggested re properties. system meets requirements. Will wait and see next time. Cheers.
by the way, like your football team!