My comp is so messed up...

[SonyGuy]

I reformatted my computer. Fresh install of windows XP. When I load it up, the hard drive is steadily working away even though nothing is loaded. If I try to run a game, it just restarts. If I try to run anything intensive, it restarts. When error reporting comes up, it blames it on my video card drivers, I updated them to the latestdriver. Still have the problem, then error reporting said it was a hardware failure reported by the CPU, still crashed. Then it said it was unknown, and then back to the video card. What is going on??

Btw- I had this problem before I reformatted and did a virus scan, had 30 viruses and NAV wouldn't fix them so I reformatted, still having this problem. Could memory be doing this? I have a friend with a few sticks of DDR laying around, maybe I should swap one out? I'm only running 1 stick of 512mb DDR...

[Jeffbx]

Geez, that doesn't sound good.

Have you re-run a virus scan? If it was a boot sector virus, it might still be resident even after a format. However, sounds more like a hardware issue. What kind of machine is it? Is it still under warranty? Could be any number of things from those symptoms.

[Cantacuzene]

Here is my guess.

You reformatted and your computer was connected to the internet before you installed service pack 1 or 2. In between the time you turned on your box and whenyou downloaded and installed SP2 (if you ever did) you were infected with trojans or were rooted.

Next time you format download the sp2 stand alone developer .exe and burn it to cd and unplug your pc from the internet, format, install sp2 then plug into the internet.

[bbrian]

This happened to me once with Windows 2000. The default install was too open and if it was connected to the internet after fresh install it would immidiately get infected. My IIS logs would show 100+ connections/sec of hack attempts.

The only thing I'd add to Canta's recommendation, is to install XP from a bootable CD so you can repartition (not just reformat) the drive.

Lastly, you could be right that you have a memory issue, but I don't think it is likely since the problems seems to have started with viruses. NAV would not have incorrectly reported viruses because of memory corruption.

[SonyGuy]

I'm going to rerun a virus scan on this thing later. The computer I built myself, so no warranty... I went over to my friends house and borrowed a stick of 256mb 2100 from him and swapped it with my 512mb stick of 2700. So far after running lots of different programs it has not restarted at all. I'm hoping this is the problem. We shall see. After a time I am going to swap it out again and start the computer up and see what happens if it is still fine after tomorrow. Thanks for all of the suggestions. If I still have the problem then I am going to reformat as you guys suggested and leave the modem unplugged this time(I'm on cable), and have all of the updates on CD to install to it. Thanks again I'll keep you posted...

[AlpineJay]

Why don't you do a memtest? Just google Memtest and you should find a utility that tests your memory for you.