The other day the computer I was using just randomly shut off for no appearent reason when a friend was checking their e-mail. It automatically rebooted and after the windows xp loading screen another windows xp screen comes up saying autochk not found - skipping autocheck and then a BSOD flashes for like half a second. It's to fast for me to read whats on it. I've tried using safe mode and boot to last known working configuration and a few other options that come up on the screen when you press f8. nothings working. anybody have this happen before? what do I do?!? Don't know if this matters but I recently installed pinnacle studio 11 on it and its been acting up since then.

What you need to do is put your Windows XP cd in to the drive and reboot and when you do a repair of Windows that will reinstall any corrupted system files.

some programs just don't work with some computers...I like pinnacle but for years it has had conflics with some ATI graphics cards and some anti-virus programs. They do have some xp patches and ATI patches to try to resolve the problem. In the meantime you gave computer issues and can't even get it back to working...and that isn't refering to pinnacle being the cause at all. You can try to pause the BSOD screen and if you time it just right it will pause and you can read what the error is. The problem is that even if you get the code...it doesn't mean that one can actually read it as that too is proprietary to either the software or hardwae that caused it... There are several things one can try to fix the problem but is mostly a proccess of elimination. Enter the BIOS and check to see if the harddrives are showing in there...if not then it means that your drive may have goneout on you. check the temps (dpending on type of motherboard) and see if any warnings are shown about being out of range...If you are running overclocked hardware then reset the configurations to default levels and see if it boots up properly... while in there change to boot order to boot to cd first boot. If you have an original installation disc you can do a scond repair option and see if that fixes it. The second repair option will repair windows files only and not mess with your personal files or pictures...if the disc can't be used because it continues to reboot then you are looking at some hardware issues... details on performing the second boot option in XP can be found : http://www.theeldergeek.com/repairi... good luck In The Matters Of Style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, Stand Like A Rock "People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid."

or format your C drive and do the fresh windows installation Thank you

How do I pause the BSOD? and how do I enter the BIOS? I let it keep rebooting to see what would happen and finally after a while another screen came up it looks like the following "american megatrends" released 11/02/2004 AMIBIOS (C)2003 american megatrends A6741VMS C3.4 110204 AMD Athlon (TM) 64 Processor 28004 Checking NVRAM... DRAM CLOCK= 333 MHz, SDRAM CAS Latency = 2.5 DEL: setup F11: Boot menu F12: Network boot TAB: logo Auto-detecting Pri master.. not detected Auto-detecting pri slave... not detected Auto-detecting sec master.. ATAPI CDROM Auto-detecting sec slave... ATAPI CDROM sec master: H002 SAMSUNG DVD-ROM SD-816B sec slave: 3.06 _NEC DVD-RW ND3520AW FDC Failure Press F1 to resume Does that help any?

FDC = Floppy Disk Controller (Failure) I would try first removing the floppy disk drive ribbon from the motherboard then entering bios and setting the boot priority options to exclude floppy disk drive. Booting into bios can vary between motherboard makes / models but the most common way is to tap the "del" key during boot up (like you would with "f8" to boot into safe mode). If your pc behaves normally after this you probably have eliminated the problem. Faulty hardware or cable?

Also, the easiest way I have found to read the bsod when it flashes up is to record it with a digital video camera and play it back on the telly in slow motion and pausing when it appears. It was very good advice given on computing.net a while back.