Dell Inspiron 8600 will only boot in safemode w/out networking

Hi, I searched your forums and many others and cannot find an answer. A friend has given me his laptop to try and get it working. I work on pc's and not laptops so I'm a little bit in a stump.

When turned on the laptop would boot for a bit and then I would get the virtual memory dump message and it would take about 2 mins to reboot again and it would all repeat again. I finally got it booted up and tried safe mode with the same issues.

I then booted the laptop up again in safemode but had networking disabled and it worked. No virtual memory dump issues and I had the laptop restored to default factory setting. Its running windows xp professional. I cant update and get online with it because of disabling the networking functions. Anyone have any ideas on how to get around this?

Thank you in advance!

 

Hi my friend and welcome to mg's :major , do you have the win xp dvd ? You can watch this video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNOQ0sCYY8s

and this guide

http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/topic/138-how-to-repair-windows-xp/

i hope it helps you !!

 

My wife has an old 8500 that the networking port went flakey on so we got a wireless pcmcia card and just disabled the onboard network port in the control panel. You could try one of those cards (wireless or wired, the wired card comes with a Cat5 network port).

Sam