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Recently I was watching a DVD and other than it skipping quite a bit everything was going OK, until about 1/2 way through... my PC freezes. After resetting it I could not get and futher than the "do you want to load safe mode" screen and no matter what I selected the PC would than reset itself. Eventually I got fed up and formatted the hard drive but I was wondering whether any of you could shed some light on what caused this?

FYI My OS was XP pro and I had fully updated versions of both Norton anti-virus & firewall running.

You could have tried the recovery console before resorting to a format.

Windows XP gets its balls in a knot and does this occasionally.

You can often get it on its feet again by popping your XP CD in, booting to the recovery console, and running chkdsk /f /r or fixboot (or if you're getting a message about a particular file being shafted, expanding that file from the i386 folder on the CD.

Edit: Oh yes, Norton is eeeevil. Try getting shot of it and installing something less broken. (I've seen instances where NIS will lose it's 'login' option meaning you can't make any changes to the system and can't even remove the bastard, no matter what kind of system priveleges you have, without manually removing all of the six hundred or so registry entries it seems to think it needs. And for this you pay subscriptions. Yay)

Have you considered firewall/antivirus prorams you don't have to pay through the nose for? AVG, Kerio, and Zonealarm are good places to start, if you've just formatted.

Iv'e been using Norton's suite of packages basically because my father is stupid enough to pay for them for his pc (which he doesn't really know how to use - but thats another story), therefore I don't have to pay to install it on mine (tenious rational I know but in the unlikely event that anyone from Norton ever asks i'll just claim it's his pc and i'm borrowing it ). Unfortunately since i've only just left uni for the world of employment I don't really have the cash to throw at a less annoying anti virus solution, however if you have any inexpensive sugestions i'm all ears.

As for why I formatted the hard drive so easily, simple answer I was having a really bad day and I just kinda snapped. The computing equivilent of punching a wall I guess.

AVG is free.Zonealarm is free, but crap.

About XP resetting itself...that's actually an internal function when some critical component (hardware/driver) fails in some way...

There's a checkbox somewhere, but I forgot where it was. Someone elaborate here.

darthdavid wrote:AVG is free.Zonealarm is free, but crap.

Thanks for the tip, i'll give AVG a go and see if I get on with it

GoldenFalcon wrote:About XP resetting itself...that's actually an internal function when some critical component (hardware/driver) fails in some way...

There's a checkbox somewhere, but I forgot where it was. Someone elaborate here.

It's in System Properties->Advanced->Startup and Recovery.

Pretty useless all things considered though, as all it does is bluescreens and leaves you to reboot manually. (Any useful information about why it fucked up gets written to the event log anyway)

darthdavid wrote:AVG is free.Zonealarm is free, but crap.

That's why you dump Zonealarm and install Kerio. Some of the features stop working after the 30 day trial period (in fact I was looking forward for them to expire).