What is reinstall?

Greetings,

My computer is having a series of problems. 2 weeks ago a friend reformated the C: partition of my hard drive and reinstalled windows. It had been having some problems like freezing every now (but I usually had many programs open at that point) and also IE closing randomly and closing all instances that I had open and the sound cutting out where I would have to restart my computer to get it back (sound is on the motherboard).

After the reformat and reinstall, things just went downhill. I got a serious speed issue (checked w/ the provider to make sure its not them and ran several bandwidth speed tests.. all looked good) and it started freezing up to 8-9 times a day but I wasn't having the sound problem. I ended up deleting most of my programs but it was still happening. My Norton Antivirus wasn't finding any viruses.

So I went ahead and reformated my C partition and reinstalled windows again to see if it might fix the problem. The speed issue went away. Within nothing installed except what came with windows, it was still freezing about twice a day. The sound is cutting out again.. and this time the screen is giving me problems, like flickering widthwise off and then on again.. and little white lines will run across it every so often lengthwise. I finally installed some programs because I need to use the computer for school. I'm a 3d animation student and need programs like Maya, Photoshop and some sort of rendering program. Even without having any of these programs open, it has started to freezes up much more often.

The only thing that I run almost all the time is music, now just through Media Player because I have nothing else.

My questions are if anyone would have any clue what could be causing this? I'm guessing it's hardware at this point. A friend suggests that it might be the addition of 512 stick of RAM but I got that in the fall and didn't really have problems until now. What other piece of hardware would do it? Could the MP3s be causing it somehow or have corrupted something? They have always been on the D: partition and there's about 10 GBs.

Any help, comments, advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!! I really need this machine and no one I know knows what's going on!

Thank you!

Diony Cook

This question was answered on April 1, 2003. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

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Computer freeze Could be due to:

1 inadequete cooling.

2 Damaged memory.

1 Make sure your Processor is not overheating, clean out the dust in your computer if necessary Dust traps heat and doesn't let it circulate easily out the computer's case.

2 Troubleshoot by removing the extra stick of memory you dropped in there It could be defective.

Bad performance could be due to:

1a Virus

2a Filesystem

1a Did you do a quick format?

A quick format doesn't necessarily remove a virus, some of them are able to survive a quick format So go with a complete format.

2a Filesystem: you didn't specify which filesystem you're using Windows XP runs much better on NTFS than FAT32 On top of that, you get the advantage of file security.

Also

Check up on that D: drive.. it could contain a virus as well. some virus go undetected by antivirus.

After doing a full format and reinstall:

Don't worry about drivers yet...

You may want to try not to touch any files in your D: drive until you have checked your system's performance to make sure everything is running well.

Then

Go to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com So that it could scan your system's hardware and give you the available drivers which it will install for you and may require you to reboot when its done At the same time, it will update your system for security patches and new optional software It's a straight through process and you shouldn't have any problems with it.

Good luck

About the author

Posted by Cecilia of Katharine Gibbs School - New York on April 1, 2003

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