… it hasn’t been feeling well of late.
I have a “put together myself” computer that has served me faithfully for two and a half years.
It has an Asus motherboard, with an Athlon 800MHz CPU and 384MB RAM.
I am running Windows XP Professional. The machine is a stand-alone.
The first problems started a few days ago when my son mentioned to me that the computer froze while he was playing a game. However, upon doing a hard reboot, the problem went away.
Then, a few days later, the computer wouldn’t do anything upon starting. It wouldn’t even do a POST. I let the computer sit overnight and again in the morning, the problem was gone.
Now, when I turn on the computer, it runs the POST, and goes to the black Windows XP screen and stays there forever. It will not finish loading Windows.
I can, however, run the machine in Safe mode.
A friend of mine suggested that my hard drive may have become severely defragmented over time. So, last night I went into Safe mode and sure enough, it was highly fragmented. I ran the defragmenter and shut down the machine. However, upon restarting it, I still have the same problem.
Does anyone have any suggestions? Please?
Zev Steinhardt