There's a lot of misinformation here:

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I'll chime in here with the sad news that a 4 year old computer is actually OLD and you need to get ready to say goodbye.


Not true. It was adequate when purchased and is adequate now. A problem has occurred that is most likely software.

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Unless you're running really advanced video editing stuff, you actually don't need a lot of processor power. RAM is the magic, and if you want a lot of RAM you need a modern OS that can talk to all of it well - like Windows 7 or - dare I say it - Mac OS X..


Hmm, so he doesn't need a lot of processing power... so I'd suggest that something 4 years old is adequate. And the claim that only a modern OS will 'talk to' all of your RAM properly is ludicrous. Not to mention that Windows 7 is not actually available yet.

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I personally have had great luck with HP's notebooks, and since Service Pack 1, Vista has been quite stable.


'Quite stable' is praise indeed, but he doesn't want it. And for every person who has great luck with HP's notebooks there is probably 0.15 of a person that has been severely disappointed by them. When did we start talking about notebooks? What has happened here is that the OS has become unstable and must be re-installed. Doug says this will take 1.5 weeks. Doug doesn't want to do this. Too bad. It will also take 1.5 weeks on a new or replacement PC (whether purchased, donated, or provided by Dell under some warranty).

So, the plan of action should be:

1) Test the RAM. I recommend running memtest overnight.

2) Reinstall the OS. Actually, this has already been done, and it works. It just needs 1.5 weeks of effort to get it to the state it was in before. Eugene's suggestion is even better, since it eliminates the possibility of a bad hard drive, allows a clean install without affecting what was already there, allows for an orderly process to copy data from the old drive to the new one *and* provides something of a backup.

Finally, I mentioned rolling back the driver, but I don't know how to do it. I still don't know, but have you tried this (How to Restore Windows XP to a Previous State)?

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