Colin Wilson wrote:
Was just wondering... my PC is running increasingly badly and crashing
more often, to the extent that I reckon I need to reformat the HD and do
a clean re-install of XP, which no doubt will cure the problem.

How old is it, and is there a common theme to the crashing ? - I had a
system that was getting increasingly random crashes, and despite
building quite a few systems over the years, I was struggling to
diagnose the cause.

It turned out to be bad capacitors around the processor - which was
quite common at one point, as a lot of manufacturers used a cheap
chinese clone of the electrolyte from a stolen formula, but was
missing one crucial ingredient :-}

If you're comfortable taking the side off, look for any bulging,
however slight around the big capacitors around the CPU - one or two
might be ever so slightly "domed" or leaking, and it only takes one
faulty one for the system to keel over randomly.

However, as a no-risk option I thought it might first be worth trying to
'repair' the existing installation, which is one of the options on my XP
bootable CD.

Depending on the mode of failure, if it happens within a couple of
hours of booting up, it's worth using a linux boot CD and seeing if
the system crashes with that running - if so, it's likely to be
hardware related, and harder to diagnose...

Other than that it's hard to know where to start - what software is
installed, and if you say Norton or McAfee we reserve the right to
laugh :-p

Have you noticed any potentially "malevolent" behaviour which might
indicate a worm / virus / malware / spyware ?

Yes, everyone immediately thinks 'software' cos its Windows.

However crashes can as easily be caused by random hardware corruption.

I got some RAM off ebay for this machine. (Mac G4) It started to go
really flakey, and I thought the disk had gione..then I grabbed a new
disk and reinstalled, and the problems mostly went, but **** still kept
happening. So I started removing one memory stick at a time. with one
out, I had a stable system. That's in the bin now.


The other issue is drive failure. 2-5 years i all a heap IDE drve worked
fairly hard can take.

And never forget fans..again this machine stopped working last summer.
took it outside and blew a ton of fluff out of the power supply and the
CPU fans. Machine now runs fine.

So before reinstalling ANYTHING. check those puffy caps,. reseat all
memory, run memtest stuff, clean out the fans of all dust, and run a
complete surface scan on the disk. Ad if there is a Bios battery, check
and replace.

Once you have a reasonably high certainty of good HARDWARE, add software.