I am fairly computer literate, so this is a first for me.. asking for help. I bought a laptop off E-bay (yes i know, a mistake) and now it is having some problems, I am wondering if anyone can give possible suggestions or help me figure out what the problem is. Here's the problem : My laptop frequently crashes, it is fine for a few days, then when i try and start a random program at no specific time, it just doesn't do anything, and when i go to reboot, the Windows XP loading screen appears, but it goes indefinetly, freezes, or reboots itself. When this occurs, by doing a full format and doing commands such as Fixboot, i can get it working again, but it will just crash itself again. I have done full virus scans, and always install a Firewall, and virus scan, and install all windows updates. I am fairly certain it isn't overheating, because when I am formatting sometimes it is on for 6 hours, and I never have it on for 6 hours otherwise, and it doesn't have problems while formatting. Sometimes it does format extremely slow though. Does anyone have any suggestions as to the cause or a possible solution. Thanks in advance. A frustrated gamer, dark_saber86 Oh, and the specs on the system are as follows: 3.0 P4, 1 Gb 400mhz ram, ATI Radeon 9600 Pro 128.

Run a full diagnostic test on the hard drive. A very good one [DLG Diagnostic] can be found here. Whom are you on computing.net?

Also run a standalone memory test on it over night. MemTest86_v3.1a