# Any way around this other than a reformat? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 31, 2003, 1:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-way-around-this-other-than-a-reformat/192024 "2003-07-31T01:17:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![bouv](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bc8723/32.png) [@bouv](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bouv)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2003, 1:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-way-around-this-other-than-a-reformat/192024/1 "2003-07-31T01:17:05Z")
OK, so somehow my computer got seriously f_cked up, and I mean f_cked! Here’s the deal: In the past three weeks my computer has crashed an average of twice per day, many times more. It started when I installed Shadows of Undrentide. I would be playing it or a while, and then the game would crash after five to thirty minutes. I noticed from reading their message board that a lot of poeple had that problem, so I stopped playing and was waiting for a patch to come out. Throughout the week, my PC would crash at random times, usually while using Media Player, but sometimes anytime. I also bought and installed Star Wars Galaxies, and that crashed during game as well, a lot. Most of the crashes have been the windows XP blue screen, but sometimes I merely got kicked from the game. I also stopped playing galaxies for a while. I haven’t played that in about five days. But now, I crash left and right while doing simple things like browsing the internet. I also think I had some spyware, since a couple pop-ups alkways appeared when I started IE, so I ran Ad-Aware, but guess what? Yup, a crash. And when I started up, it crashed again after logon. I tried to run it again, but more crashing insued. I ran Spybot, it got a lot of stuff, but no crash. It couldn’t remove one item, so i restarted and ran it again, this time it did crash. So trhat’s where I am, I get a blue screen now every five to thirty minutes, it seems, for no reason. It seems that whatever serious ass thing that occured can only be gotten rid of with a reformat, which means all 100 GB of my stuff I have is gone unless I back it up on CD-R’s, which will take a loooong time. So, any other suggestions before I do the almost inevitable? ---
**Author:** ![sailor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a587f6/32.png) [@sailor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sailor)\ **Post date:** [July 31, 2003, 1:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-way-around-this-other-than-a-reformat/192024/2 "2003-07-31T01:38:45Z")
I’ll tell you a story. About 5 or 6 weeks ago a friend of mine tried to install some software in my computer but it crashed several times and we gave up. From that day on the computer was _constantly_ crashing and I ws really angry with him. i blamed it all on the failed install. . . Until I started to realize the computer was running much hotter due to the hot weatehr now. So, I have the case open and a strong fan pointed towards it and things are _much_ better now. I may even try to slow down the speed a notch to keep it cooler. The reason I say this is that sometimes the cause is not what you think even if there seems to be a connection.