My pc has been acting awful strange recently, to summise....

1. windows frequently wouldn't shut down, it would stay at the 'windows is shutting down' screen, so i'd be forced to turn it off at the plug (not healthy i presume)

2. My dvd re writer suddenly cease to recognise if there was a cd put in it.

3. on thursday night windows wouldn't load (im on xp).First of it said config32 (or something like that) couldnt be located. It would go through memory check, the windows xp logo would appear with the blue bar below it, the screen would go black and then it would restart and go through the same cycle.

4. since im a bit of a noob in comp affairs i adopted the sledgehammer approach and reinstalled windows completely. This was going well and i got all the neccessary drivers in etc and even got vent, cod4, DC etc installed. However, after a bit i noticed strange things happening....i tried to patch COD4 to version 1.5 but it said it wasn't even installed even though i could see it was. Also, my sound card drivers suddenly corrupted and the pc went back to doing basic beeps. Also, i got vent working, but when i tried it again a short time later it wouldn't boot up and an icon appeared with what looked like unknown language text on it (the type that shows squares etc instead of say..japanese symbols).

5. And now its back to the initial not working cycle (i.e. windows not starting up properly).


I've even taken the case of to check if there was anything physically wrong with it but as far as i could tell it looked ok to my inexpert eye.

Help anyone????



p.s. im thinking of getting a brand new system anyway as this one is starting to age and i've obviously more money than sense. Whats the difference between vista 32 & 64? Am i right in thinking that 64 has no memory limit and if so whats the limit of 32? Can someone surmise the difference between amd and intel cpu's?

apologies for all the questions and general noobishness.

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can't help you with the current pc

but intel cpu's win at the moment

and using a 64 bit os will make everything use twice as much room (64 bits minimum instead of 32 bits aka 4gig ram becomes 2gig ram...), it's better in the long run but for now i don't think there are too many advantages

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The banhammer thirsts for tards | There is no 'overkill'. There is only 'open fire' and 'I need to reload'.

shameless bump. Sorry but i need answers people.

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down load this and burn it to cd if you can
http://www.memtest.org/
also in the bios look at the psu voltages - are they all over the place ?

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1) What is the spec of your PC? - If you are unsure go to Start -> Run -> Type 'dxdiag' and press enter, and screenshot that and post that up.

2) Go to Run again, type 'msconfig' and press enter, go to 'Startup' and screenshot that and post that up too.

3) make sure to make a post before you buy the new PC, since your a hardware noob you'll prob go for PC World and get done over otherwise..

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