Hi - I have a Gateway 600 series notebook that is about 5 years old w/ XP pro on it and I am having serious problems with it and want to know the best way to go about solving them. Other info on my computer is that it has a 30 GB HD (although I recently bought an big external drive to back everything up on), 512 MB RAM, a Pentium 4 processer (not sure how fast).

So 1 problem is that I belive I have a worm virus or something that usually brings up the message NT Authority/System, and shuts down my computer. I have been trying to install McAfee antivirus to combat this, but my computer won't let me install it for some reason.

I cannot connect to the internet. I use firefox and am on a network in my apartment which is working on the other computers. I have had access to the internet with it before, but in the past 2 weeks it has just gone away. I think it may be something with the setting on my firefox but I don't know how to re-setup the program, plus my Internet Explorer is not working either, so it may be something else. I've tried going into the control panel to work with network connections, but nothing comes up. I also tried finding the device to re-install it, but nothing shows up there either.

Basically I can't do much on my computer these days. Even when I get it to load without restarting, the start menu does not appear, it is hard or impossible to run programs through the disc drive, my CPU usage is always at 100% for some reason, which is a new development. I have backed up all my files and really think probably the easiest way to fix it would to be to wipe everything clean and start over, but I don't even know how to do that. I do have the original XP OS disc w/product key and the application and drivers disc. Any help on what I should do would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Oh, and I get the Blue Screen of Death fairly often with the error message "unmountable boot volume", though I think that may be coming more from overheating, which I will hopefully address after I get the hardware issues taken care of. Thanks again.


Erik

Sounds like a good time to reinstall XP.

Do you have a Microsoft XP CD or an XP CD from your computer manufacturer? If the latter who is the manufacturer?

Either way basically boot the CD and follow the prompts.

Here is a good general guide with screenshots as well.

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html