bloke

Great, thanks.

Are there any good (shareware at least) programs to defrag a hard drive better than Windows?

Interestingly our new version of XP has none of those updates (the other, old, though still present, version did). Maybe that's the cause.

Well here is the wierd thing. My brother has somehow reinstalled windows xp. Now the computer works (or seems to), but XP exists twice on the c drive. Formatting the c drive from the dos prompt doesn't work either because the command says the drive is invalid. Perhaps the hard drive is screwed. I don't really understand how XP can exist twice on the machine, but this installation appears stable.

Are you 100% sure it's a driver issue; I've heard it might be hardware based (not that I have a clue mind you). What causes this?

(HI, I'm new and I have a problem) Got up yesterday morning and found the pc won't start at all. Each time the powerup process gets to the user select screen (there are two people with separate logon accounts) the machine restarts. It won't even start in safe mode because the same thing happens. I tried starting with removing the auto restart on error function and got the following error messages ('a problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage'): IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL and 'technical information: ***STOP:0X0000000A (0X0A08000D, 0X00000002 (or Z i couldn't tell), 0X00000000, 0X804EC6D4)' No other information about the error (the message just said restart the machine basically, which I can't). Machine: Pentium 4 2ghtz, 256mb ram, ati radeon 7500, partioned hard drive (20gb, 76gb; roughly) and XP pro. Used to be my dad's but is used by me and my brother with separate user accounts. I don't know a huge amount about technical issues as well (so if it's hardware related I'm scr3w3d). Thanks.