Drive crashing problem

I just got this email from a relative in the UK.

"I have a computer problem. Let's see if I can write and send this before my computer crashes again. My computer has been "crashing" about maybe once a month for a few months now. It just restarts all of a sudden right in the middle of what I'm doing. It then says something about checking a drive (maybe..) for consistency. Then it usually doesn't do it for a while. But it just did it twice in the last ten minutes. I don't know what to do or what's wrong. It's the C drive though. That's the drive it was checking. Something about an error. It tells me not to defrag or anything so I don't know what to do. In case it helps, the programs that I had open at the time were windows explorer, MSN, Internet explorer on the hotmail site, microsoft word and windows media listening to a song."

The OS is XP home.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I told her to make sure her AVG database is up to date, and to run a full scan.

Thanks all

 

First thing i would do is turn off the auto restart

Right click my computer--properties--advanced--start up and recovery settings--uncheck automatically restart--and check the box write an event to the system log--apply and ok
This should bring up a blue screen when a crash happens, hopefully displaying the details of what caused the crash

Check event viewer for errors that happened at the time of the crash
Start--Run--Type eventvwr.msc--ok

Post back with any details from the blue screen or the event logs and hopefully we can help you out