Ollie

Boot to your XP CD, then follow the on screen prompts. You don't want the repair console, you want to repair windows XP. Do this then let us know what happens as I think I have some other ideas you could try also.

You want one of these. However a laptop hard drive isn't really any good for a media box, even the 7200rpm drives are slower than IDE 7200 drives. Especially when you think, I just got a SATAII drive 250 gig, with 16mb cache for £55. HDD's are just so cheap these days!

Download these for free and run them one at a time: Adaware Spybot What anti virus guard do you use? I have recently found AVG and it is great, I know others here use it to. AVG Free

Ok, leave it with me, I'll churn through that lot and get back to you as soon as I can. Just building my new PC right now, exciting!

Booker, could I ask you for some more info please. What OS are you running? Have you made any hardware/software changes lately (or since this started happening) also some basic system specs such as CPU/RAM types/speeds/sizes etc. EDIT - Done some research, so you are running XP X64 edition then? Found this on another forum: So you should make sure you have the latest version of your motherboard bios, and try setting your bios to use default or optimal settings? EDIT 2 - Having said that, after a bit more research, could you provide me some information from your event log please? To get it, go to control panel, double click admin tools, open 'Event Viewer' click the 'System' view on the left, when your system BSOD's it creates a system event 1001 or 1003, can you provide the latest 5-10 of these? If you double click on it it will give you the details of the event, you can then copy these to the clip board:

Nice one. My work here is done.

lol, sorry. I just checked my router and it automatically gets the DNS address. Can you provide a screen shot? EDIT - Just about to have my dinner, but add me to msn and I'll have a go at it with you in about half an hour ([email protected])

I think its asking for the DNS of your ISP, but I would have thought this is done using DHCP (basically you automatically get assigned an IP address from your ISP each time you connect). Is there an option to select DHCP assigned DNS anywhere?

Click 'start' then 'run' type cmd and press enter. Now type: ipconfig /all and press enter. If I do it I get the IP address of my router, why do you need this address?

So I'm looking to get a 7600GT at the moment, I was going to get the XFX7600GT XXX edition, which is around £130, but I have just seen that overclockers.co.uk are doing the BFG 7600GT for £88 at the moment. Seem's like a sweet deal and the card is well spec'd, I just haven't heard of BFG, are they ok?

Thanks everyone. I ordered it today, should be here tomorrow. It is the last part of my PC upgrade, I'm excited!

I like zygo's efforts. Its as if I can see into the future!

I'm not saying that junk food is bad, but its only really ok in moderation, I'm pretty bad myself, junk food just tastes so good but I like to think that I eat enough fruit and veg to counter the junk I do eat.

If its the Pro edition then it is a good price, but if its the home edition its about right, do you know which version you are getting?

My girlfriend likes them, you should check out a band called Zero 7 and The Postal Service, they are both great and similar. QFT!

You need to make sure that you get the copy of the original disk and the XP product key that he uses to install it, otherwise you might not be getting a legit copy. Tell you what you would probably be better off getting this. Yes it would, I'll have another look about. My friend has 6800's in SLi (two cards in one computer - one card renders top 2 thirds of the screen other card does bottom third) and they are very good cards!

There seems to be a lot of junk food going down, get healthy people!

I am about to eat cheese and sliced tomatoe on a marks and spencers white sub roll. Now that's good food.

The specs are good, although the chipset isn't that new, these guys like it tho and it appears to perform well. How much did you pay for it? EDIT - Was just looking at the PC again, you do know that it doesn't have Windows pre installed don't you?

Ok, I will try and give a quick lesson to anyone who is interested in graphics cards. When looking at them there are a few things to take into account. A graphics card is like a small computer in itself, in that it has a processor and memory. Like computer processors graphics cards processors have various flavours. There are two main CPU producers (Intel and AMD) there are also two main chip producers for graphics cards, Nvidia and ATi. Like computers they sell their chips to manufacturers to make cards with them, so you might buy a Dell PC with an Intel processor, just like you can buy a card made by XFX with an Nvidia chip. Graphics cards have memory, like a computer, ranging from 32Mb to 1Gb. Unlike a computer, you can’t add more. If we think about computer processors, for this example take the Intel Pentium processor, it has evolved over the years, from the P1 up to the current P4. In the same way, graphics cards processors have evolved, for example, the chip used on an ATi 9600 (about 4/5 years old) is not as good as the processor on a current day ATi X1900, even though it is likely that you can buy both cards with the same amount of memory. The clock speeds on the chips will be very different. Also, memory has evolved, it comes in various shapes and sizes and where old GPU’s would have used SDRAM (old and slow by today’s standards) new cards use GDDR3 memory. There are other bits and pieces that I don’t understand all that well, which I am hoping someone like Jordan can fill you in with (things like Pipelines, Memory bandwidth’s/frequencies, OpenGL, DX, etc) but here is a quick example incase that lot wasn’t clear: These are the specs that I just found for the XFX 7900GT Clock rate - 470 MHz Chipset - 7900 GT Memory - 256 MB Bus Type - PCI-E Memory Type - DDR3 It is an Nvidia card, the CPU speed is 470 MHz using the Nvidia processor the 7900GT. It has 256MB of DDR3 Memory. These are the specs for the Gainwood 6600 Ultra nVidia GeForce : 6600 Clock rate : 300 MHz Memory : 128MB DDR Also an Nvidia card, it has a CPU speed of 300 Mhz and is using the Nvidia processor the 6600. It has 128MB of DDR memory. Hopefully you can see why one is better than the other, there is more to it, but this will get you by at the most basic level and hopefully allow you to choose a good graphics card.

Depends how much you want to spend mike. You can get something like the 7600GT for around £110 or the 7950 GX2 for around £450. Plus inbetween there are lots of models at varying prices. Those are the nVidia cards around right now, I'm a bit behind with ati however I think if you want an ati dont go lower than the x1600 series. EDIT - No, its old and you will have problems on wow, not to mention its a bottle neck by comparrison to the rest of the machine Have a look here at some graphics cards

I have decided it is time to upgrade my PC to 64bit. I am going to use the case/hdd and optical drives that I already have but need a new mobo/cpu/ram and PSU. I might be able to use the ram I already have but that depends on the mobo and the hard drives I have at the mo are ATA so unless you can get adaptors I'll need a new HDD. My question is, can anyone recommend a good motherboard? I don't have loads of cash, this is the Processor I want to get, I need a future proof Mobo so that I can upgrade to dual core at a later date. If you have a 64bit mobo and think it's good, it would be nice if you could post a llink and give me your thoughts. Thanks!

Well my original reason for upgrading was because I needed data integrity for my final year at university, don't want to loose my final year project, so I wanted a motherboard that did RAID 1. However, I might as well get upto date at the same time so I have got a motherboard that is pretty future proof and I'm going to get a 64bit processor, I will probably run the Vista Beta 2 x64 that I have got, but I haven't decided yet. I already have an enermax psu, they are great, I think I'm going to get this one (my current psu isn't ATX ver 2.0 compatible).

I think I'll definately go with that mobo, seem's nice and future proof even tho it is quite expensive, my last one cost £45 but that is probably why 2 years later it's useless! Time to find a good PSU now, lol! EDIT: UPDATE - For those of you that are interested, I bought this board. It is different to the one I talked about before as it has the nForce 590 chipset instead of the 570, so it does x16 SLi should I ever want it, the other board only did x8 SLi. It also has some other little extras like wifi which I probably wont ever use!

Thanks everyone for your input, so would this meet your needs Jordan? This Mobo looks sweet as far as I'm concerned. This CPU however, I can't afford that, so maybe for the future, and for now this.