Help, What gives, my computer freezes at the compaq screen when I'm trying to boot up to WINXP. I was told try and remove some ram boards and see is one is bad, Tried it and thought I found the culprit, but it happened again. Also was told the slots on the MB for the ram could be loose and needed to "swell up" with the heat to get a tight fit. Which is possible because after around 5-6 restarted it works. Any other thoughts on this? Thanks

Yeah, don't turn yur PC off and on so much, leave it on standby if possible to retain system heat. PCs are designed to be left on, switching on and off on a regular basis does more harm than good.

How long has it been doing this? What if any hardware/software changes have you made? If you think it's a RAM issue then download Memtest86. Run the .exe with a formatted floppy in your A drive. then reboot with the floppy. That will soon let you know if it's a memory issue. Apart from that, check all your cables/ribons and PCI cards to be sure they are properly seated. Get an airduster and carefully blow out the RAM slots. There might be a bit of dust disrupting your connections. Can you even boot from floppy or CD? If so then you may have a bootsector problem with the harddrive. Try a few things and post back with further info.

Use a boot dist from bootdisk.com to boot it up, once u get on (if you get on), go to run and type in msconfig click on boot.ini and choose safe boot restart computer(make sure to remove the floppy) go to my computer right click whichever hard drive is your main harddrive go to tools check disk for errors and check all the boxes if theres a pop-up that says something has exclusive acess over the harddrive and in order to do the scan, you must restart the computer then go back to msconfig check normal start up then there shoould be scanning