If you problem were caused by overheating, the blue screens would probably not appear when the computer has had a chance to cool down. There a lots of things you could try that don't require you re-install Windows from scratch. Trying to fix a problem by re-installing Windows from scratch, or by running a Recovery procedure for your brand name computer software installation, is often very short sighted. Doing that won't cure problems caused by hardware. It takes less than a hour to run Windows Setup from a Windows CD, or several hours to use the proper Recovery CD or Recovery CD set that restores the orginal brand name software installation, but that's only the first step. It may take the equivalent of many days before your system is as it was before, if you had a lot of programs installed, and you will lose any personal data you have added to the partition Windows is on, unless you back it up somewhere else first. You could test your hard drive, but I see no indication in your posts that you have a problem with the hard drive. Check your hard drive with the manufacturer's diagnostics. See the latter part of response 1 in this: http://www.computing.net/windows95/... (thanks to Dan Penny for this link:) Hard Drive Diagnostics Tools and Utilities http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm... If you don't have a floppy drive, you can get a CD image diagnostic utility from most hard drive manufacturer's web sites, but obviously you would need to make a burned CD, preferably a CD-R for best compatibilty, on another computer if you need to. If the hard drive itself tests okay, any data problems found can be fixed, one way or another.

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I've seen a whole host of reasons for this by searching the web, although when I was having blue screen boot troubles in the past, it was actually a problem at my end with the power supply and cooling fan. Not enough power to the fan and the computer was practically melting away. If I left it for a while, it would boot fine but it was a disaster repair job waiting to happen. I still wouldn't rule out the virus possibility. Although the RAM connection sounds like your best bet to me. Maybe try playing with that, and keep an eye on the temperature of your system from the BIOS. http://www.pcfixreview.com

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Thank you all for your responses! After days of testing, cleaning and so on in my spare time I was finally able to read and back-up the data on my hard drive using a Linux live cd - forced, that is, because it first couldn't mount my HD either ($Logfile indicated unclean shutdown). - chkdsk found errors and chkdsk \r made a found.001 folder containing dir0000.chk with ~wrd0005.doc and ~wrs0002.tmp - one of them was sort of readable and contained a web page code created by Word and a "saved by Firefox 2.0.08" header text, but these were already modified in February, apparently. BTW I never use Word to create web pages. - My WD HD tested ok with WD Lifeguard Diagnostics - One of the 3 RAMs was a little loosely connected, but they tested ok. Removing one of the two newest (2005) memory bars didn't get Windows to boot properly; removing the original RAM (2001 or so) made the pc beep 3 times twice and not boot at all - My live Linux CDs give the error message "$Logfile indicated unclean shutdown" when I try to reach the hard drive, so I have to force it to mount some of the times. I guess this means the problem is Windows wasn't shutdown well before the problem started? Is there any way I could save my Windows install and the programs on it and get it to boot properly again? I can maybe free about 15GB or more of my 40GB hard drive space (no partitions) and I have a system-only back-up from September. I hope you can help me!

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"chkdsk found errors and chkdsk \r made a found.001 folder containing dir0000.chk with ~wrd0005.doc and ~wrs0002.tmp - one of them was sort of readable and contained a web page code created by Word and a "saved by Firefox 2.0.08" header text, but these were already modified in February, apparently. BTW I never use Word to create web pages." The file fragments saved by chkdsk /f or chkdsk /r usually contain useless-to-the-user data. They are usually recovered lost clusters of data caused by a program freezing, or by you not shutting down Windows properly, etc. Chkdsk finding those usually does not indicate there is data damage on the hard drive, unless removing the lost cluster truncated (chopped off)one of the files involved such that it is no longer as it should be. The errors chkdsk found may have been caused by this: "(I deleted the url classifier mysqllite database from the FF folder since it had gotten over 50 MBs again) and suddenly the pc shut down the normal way without me telling it to shut down but it didn't shut down completely" Are you using sql server software on this machine? You may not use Word, and you may not even have it installed, but if you don't have Word, your browser, or another program, may have a Word reader built into it, and your operating system has Wordpad built into it which can read Word files made by older versions of Word. "One of the 3 RAMs was a little loosely connected, but they tested ok. Removing one of the two newest (2005) memory bars didn't get Windows to boot properly; removing the original RAM (2001 or so) made the pc beep 3 times twice and not boot at all " The ram should not be loose - the latches at the ends of each slot that has a module in it should be against the ram module. If the ram modules are all compatible and seated properly, and their contacts are clean, it should not matter which ones are installed - the computer should boot fine in all cases. Sometimes you have to try removing it and installing it several times before it's actually seated properly. Did you do run a ram test with all 3 modules installed, or did you test each one individually? The ram modules passing individually does not necessary indicate it will pass when more than one is installed - if all the ram isn't 100% compatible you will likely get memory errors when more than one is installed. If you do a ram test, do that AFTER having tried cleaning the contacts and making sure the ram is seated properly - otherwise any errors found may be FALSE. If the ram is incompatible with the chipset, it will likely FAIL a ram test - that is NOT a true indication of the ram being faulty - there is probably nothing wrong with it, and it will pass the test if installed in a mboard it is compatible with. If you want to try a memory diagnostic utility that takes a lot less time to run a full pass than memtest86 does, this one is pretty good - Microsoft's Windows Memory Diagnostic: http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag... It can be toggled to do a standard or a more comprehensive set of tests - use the default 6 test one first - if it passes one pass of that, use the latter one. A few of the tests in the latter set are intentionally slower. " My live Linux CDs give the error message "$Logfile indicated unclean shutdown" ..." I know almost nothing about Linux - look up the exact message on the web. .... "Is there any way I could save my Windows install and the programs on it and get it to boot properly again?" Did you make the Recovery CD set for your original Siemens software installation, using a Siemens supplied program already there in All Programs, or did you last load Windows from scratch from a regular Windows CD? Do you have, or can you borrow, a regular Windows 2000 CD? It can be useful even if it is not bootable. By the way, you should have at least SP4 updates installed in 2000, not just SP1 updates. In any case, you could hook up the hard drive to a working computer and copy personal data you don't want to lose off of it, but programs you installed would have to be installed again - if you don't have the CDS for the programs, or back up copies of those programs, and if you can't get the downloads for those programs from the web, they are lost. E.g. If it is an IDE drive, hook it up to another computer as slave on either IDE channel, or as master on the Secondary IDE channel - don't try booting from it.

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