Greetings everyone, and thank you in advance for taking the time to read this post. It concerns my laptop, and I'll cut right to the chase. A while ago I bought an emachine secondhand. I set up a wireless internet connection and everything worked fine. However, soon it started messing up. For simplicity's sake I'll just list the symptoms of this hateful machine

*when I tell it to shut down, it takes like 3 minutes for the screen to come up, and when I press the shut down item, it logs me off after like 4 minutes and turns to the blue screen with "windows is shutting down..." on it (I have xp if you havn't guessed). And it will never, ever turn off. I have to hold turn it off all the time with the manual button thingy
*It takes a long time to connect to the internet (maybe this is a wireless problem or something, but I have a good connection)
*it usually pops up one or two fatal error messages when I am using the computer, including those debug or delete program messages.
*I recently tried installing software and there was a fatal error, it said something about makeing sure the file exists. Then there was a fatal error 1603 or1605 or something.
*when I turn it on, it occasionally starts whirring very loudly and shuts off.
*the disk drive makes a really loud banging sound sometimes (this is random as well)

*in general, the computer is unreliable, slow, and annoying.

I'll be honest I'm no computer master hacker, but I've tried
-restore points
-reinstalling xp
-a plethora of anti virus software, although I doubt the problem concerns a virus

Any help on this matter would be worthy of incredible thanks!!!:notworthy:

Welcome to THF sparticus :wave:

Have you tried any spyware scans such as Spybot, Adware or HijackThis?

Hiya sparticus :wave:

If you have performed a clean install of XP and still having problems i would think your problem is hardware related, possibly a faulty RAM module.

You can run a test by using memtest86.

Hey thanks a lot for the posts. Yes I think there is some problem with the hardware, because I've run about seven million free spybot/adware/etc scans and they say that I'm clean. Maybe though my foolish brother did download viruses or something; he's big on illegal music. Anyways I shall run that test and hopefully find something out. Any other insight though would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!

Whoops didn't see where you tried to reinstall :blush: