In an effort to upgrade my wife’s computer so that it would be faster, more powerful, and maybe even easier to use, I upgraded from Windows 98se to Windows XP. Of course, like some of the other improvements I tried (I won’t even get into transferring her 6 gig hard drive, to the new 80 gig I bought for her, except to say, Partition Magic my A**), things didn’t go as smooth as would have liked.
Her computer keeps getting fatal errors that shut down Windows, causes a memory dump, then reboots. Usually this happens when she’s on line, all though I think it happened once or twice while she was doing a McAfee virus scan.
Well, this morning, I typed in “crash” in Help and Support and it came up with DR. Watson program error debugger, which blamed Zone Alarm for the last error. This would make sense, since her crashes mostly happen while she’s on line. So I’m keeping my fingers crossed…
FYI: Upgrading from Win98 to WinXP will generally cause a good deal of problems (or at least exacerbate those that already existed), especially if you didn’t convert the filesystem to NTFS. You would be best off backing up the important files and starting from scratch to avoid future issues.
Also, if you had an older computer with a 6GB drive and Win98, I would suspect that your other hardware might not be up to snuff enough for XP. What are the specs on the computer?
What midget said. Clean installing XP really is the way to go for maximum stability, also if you try to put XP on a slow box it seems (in my experience) to cause problems beyond just slow responsivness. About 500 mhz is the slowest I would go with XP and that’s pushing it.
A third recommendation for clean-installing XP, if that’s at all an option for you.
If you want to troubleshoot more, it sounds like XP is generating a blue-screen - getting the error code off of it would be the best thing you can do.
If your PC is restarting too fast to read it, Go to Start->Control Panel->System (Or Control Panel->Performance&Maintenance->System if you have Category view on, or just right-click on “My Computer” and choose Properties… )
Well, however you get there, get to System Properties. Select Advanced, then the bottom “Settings” button in the “Startup and Recovery” section.
Down by “System failure”, uncheck “Automatically restart”. The next time the computer blue-screens, you’ll be able to read the error message. Write it down, along with the ‘0x12345678’ hex codes.
Type in the message, (and maybe the first hex code) where it says “Search the Knowlege Base” on the Microsoft Knowledge Base page, and check out what comes up.
No, she’s using a new and modern system I put togeather myself. Pentium 4 motherboard and CPU running at 2.53ghz. She’s using an 80 gig hard drive. I tried to copy the contents of the 6 gig using Partition Magic, but kept getting errors, so I dumped the contents of the driver using the freeware Ranish Partition Manager, which made the computer think that my 80 gig drive was a 6 gig drive, but using Partition Magic, and after several problems trying to get an 80 gig partition, I made two 40 gig paritions, after which then Partition manager told me I could expand one of them into the full 80 gigs.
But anyway, that’s irrelivant. She has a P4, 2.53ghz speed, and an 80 gig hard drive. I also had to buy a new modem that had Windows XP compatible drivers, and I got a 32meg AGP video card. Nothing to old or slow here.
Well, using the event viewer, we reported the problems to Microsoft support last night. Then, this morning, I learned about the DR. Watson program, which my wife ran, and it pointed out corrupted files in Zone Alarm, so she uninstalled, then reinstalled it, and so far, no problems, so hopefully that was it.
Select Advanced, then the bottom “Settings” button in the “Startup and Recovery” section.