I have been having this problem for about 4 months, it happened once before, but then stopped now, it has gotten worse. I am on my computer and then restart it and it comes up with a blue screen before log in and says beginning dump of physical memory, then it says dumping physical memory to disk, and it counts up from 1 to about 40 very fast, then i restart it again which is what i did before, now, it says Windows cannot start because the following file is missing or corrupted: ntoskrnl.exe, please reinstall a copy of this file. I tried to reinstall Windows XP Professional but the same error message comes up. I went online and it looks like to me that i am having general hardware failure, please let me know what you all think. thanks!

This is not a hardware failure for sure. The memory dump error is virtual memory, not physical memory. What you can do is a repair of XP and that should fix the problem. Change your boot sequence and boot to the cd, then choose the 2nd repair option.