Have you tried a complete reformat of the HD, then re-install from that? If you still get the blue screen then it's def a hardware fault.

Do you mean that you are trying to install from an XP installation copy that resides on your hard disk or are you using a CD?

Optimist, sometimes I get hardware fault error when it tries to install and does a reboot to install more windows files

Seymour Clearly, havnt do a reformat yet trying to keep as much as my data as possible.

Haystack, I am using the Windows XP CD that came with the PC

RG

Are you booting the machine from the CD or running it from within Windows?

Optimist, booting from CD, cant get any from Windows or any other access to be able to use PC

If you need your data then you really should take the HD out and install it as a slave drive on another machine, then interrogate the drive and copy all your data files over. It doesn't sound as though a reinstall over the original copy of XP is ever going to work.

I read somewhere else (on this thread?) that a lot of games patches / cheats are ways of getting viruses and malaware onto your machine. I think you really need to be very careful in future!

Seymour, Think it was when I installed a antivirus software to do it it wanted to uninstall my firewall because of conflict with it, and when it did that I got attack hacked ;-(

RG

It does sond as though you need to do a full format of the C drive although I aggree in part with SC's comment that you should install a new hard drive and keep all of your data on the old one.

As you appear to have had severe virus problems, I suggest that to be completely safe you boot the computer from a live Linux CD and copy all of your data to a USB drive. Be careful what you copy and use a Linux based AV checker on the drive. This is a bit OTT for most viruses but at least it should keep you safe.

A new HDD is always a good idea, 50 buys you a bigger, better and faster drive, but if you want to reformat the drive you can do that with the setup CD. When it asks which disk you want to use, you can delete the partition or partitions and then create and format a new one.

When you have it up and running, do not connect to the internet except through a firewall router, then only conect to Microsoft until you have all the service packs and updates installed. Make sure you install IE8 as that is currently the most secure. After that, you can install your AV program (one only please!) and then enable file sharing if you want to.

I lost my broadband connection earlier today, normally I just go and use my backup Pipex

But not installed the Alcatel Speedtouch USB Manta (green) ASDL Modem, I found the disk and installed software etc, windows then finds new hardware and tries to install drivers, by connecting to Internet, I tell it no use drivers available from windows it does but for some reason it will not load the drivers correctly on start-up and keeps telling me the modem is not plugged in, which of cause it is

How do I sort this out?????

RG

No wonder you are having virus problems!!

The only safe way to connect to the internet is to use an Ethernet/Wireless firewall router.

USB modems are just not safe. Throw it away.!!!

Optimist, my normal connection is through a wireless router by Virgin Cable, I use my modem to connect to Pipex when the cable goes off ;-)

RG

Imagine that you are going hang gliding, you gret to the top of a cliff and realise that your glider is U/S.

Do you:-

A. Go back down and decide to try another day?

B. Jump off the cliff without your glider, stretch your arms sideways and hope to get down OK?

;))

PS.

I suggest you get a different ISP. My broadband has never been down for more than a few minutes and then only rarely.

Optimist I have two different ISP one is Virgin Media cable, the other is Pipex telephone which connects using the USB modem

In that case, throw away the USB modem and get an ADSL Firewall/Router for your Pipex connection.

That way, for most of the time you will have two broadband connections always connected and if one goes wrong then all you have to do is swap the network cables from one box to the other in the event of a failure.

An enhancement to this would be to add an Ethernet router which would give you some degree of load balancing and automatic fall over should one connection fail.

Assuming that you don't want to buy an Ethernet router, you could achieve a similar effect by connecting both ADSL routers to your network, make sure that the router you use for Pipex has DHCP disabled, is on the same subnet as your Virgin router but has a different IP address. Then manually add that address as an extra default gateway in the advanced TCP/IP properties of each machine on your network. The Virgin link will be used normally but if it goes down your machines will switch over to the Pipex link although you may have to reopen the browser.

I've just been checking some of my movie, mp3's files etc, since i've had to format a few times recently it looks like I've lost most of my codecs that played these files, I've installed K-Lite mega pak, Divx 7 and WM9codecs, but still a few are not working, cant even get WM11 to download the codec it's self even thou the settings are told to automatically.

Strange thing is some of the files are backed up on different harddrives even my portable HD, which does not play a few of these files but on the main one they play OK., some play sound but no video or vice versa, upto the recent formats all played fine

Cant even find out would these files were encoded with from properties etc

1: What other codecs should I try and download etc
2: When I burn the files and the codec is not installed does that have an effect on the playback on DVDs that play avi's Divx etc

R69,

You might find http://www.soundtaxi.info sorts out some of your problems.

I have the Pro version.

It's a while since I looked at that site and it has certainly progressed over the last year.

TP

RG69,

If you're not totally wedded to WM11, try VLC instead - http://www.videolan.org - it will play pretty much everything other than Real Media files. For mp3, I would heartily recommend MediaMonkey - http://www.mediamonkey.com

ThePublisher, zzaxx99 thanks ;-)

Have any of you folks tried this system for reducing the bulk of Windows?

http://www.nliteos.com/index.html

I heard of it through a photographic site as a way of getting more on to a small computer.

TP

TP

I tried it sometime ago to make some highly customised Win XP SP3 install disks and although it appeared to work and indeed the Install disks worked, I had a few problems with the resulting Windows machine. This could have been due to a fault with nlite or perhaps I tried to cut out too many things. Anyway, I would not recommend it unless you have several machines to setup and you need them all to be the same. Even then, there are Microsoft tools (especially for Vista) that will do a better job.

nlite uses slipstreaming which is an extremely useful Microsoft utility. If you want to create an up to date installation disk with all the SP's- which is well worth doing, then use the slipstream utility on it's own