Serious Problem with Windows XP

This is a real tough one guys, I will try and explain as best as I can.

My issue:

I do a fresh install of windows xp, perform all necessary updates, install all my apps etc. Pc works fine for a few days then there will come a moment when i will experience intermittent "freezing", for example i will play a song in media player, song will freeze at long intervals, where i can not click on anything with receiving a response (or extremely slow delay) until the desktop seems to stop functioning completely. I will then be forced to switch off the pc with the power button,

Upon restart, xp would load, this symptom will happen again, another restart, and upon xp loading, i will get a message that a serious error would have occurred in the windows registry and that it has been recovered. If windows crashes again after this, upon reboot the pc will inform me that c:\windows\system (or a file within was not found) prompting me to repair with a windows cd.

After this, i tried repairing windows on the drive from the cd (seems to overwrite some files from the cd). When I usually do this step, when the xp installation completes i usually get a blue screen with a "page fault in non paged area.." error and some error codes below which i can post if needed.
Upon reboot however, windows loads giving me enough time to backup my important files. I then usually do a complete format "format c: /FS:NTFS" from the recovery console and install windows from scratch.

When installing from scratch, windows appears to work fine for a few days but i am afraid this will happen again. It has happened 3 times in the last two weeks and I have no clue as to what the cause of this is (or even if it is a software problem) My Pc has worked more or less fine for the year + I have had it with the same software, hardware etc.

My PC specs:

Asus A8N nforce 4 SLI motherboard
Ati x850xt 256mb video card
Raptor 10,1000rpm 40gb hdd (one i usually install windows on for best performance) - SATA HD
Seagate barracuda 40gb hdd - IDE HD
1gb corsair low latency ram
Nec DVD drive
450w+ enermax psu

Sorry if this came out long but I am trying to explain as much as possible as this problem is driving me crazy as there seems to be no logical explanation, i have left out some details of other things i have tried out but will post later if i get a response. Thanks for reading through. I hope majorgeeks can help

 

Thx for the reply,

Any tips on what kind of ram test i should run? (or how to do it).

I will check and write down my voltages listed in the bios too.

 

Why did you do an OS re-install in the first place?

If you had mal-ware, ad-ware, spy-ware, under-ware, etc., you probably can't re-install OS over top of it...

 

K Tim, thanks for the tips once again, ran mamtest as instructed, in windows however, i did not find a method to run it while booting from a floppy, closed as many apps and taskbar items as possible, before running, left it running for a while and stopped it at 278% (did a quick check on ram 2.78 times i reckon) which took around 10-15mins, no errors were found till this point.

I can let it run longer if you think it is necessary (readme file suggests overnight)

I also wrote down the voltages and temps listed in my bios, listed below:

Vcore Voltage: 1.53V
3.3V Voltage: 3.24V
5V Voltage: 4.99 - 5.02 (sometimes changed to 5.02 while i wrote down)
12V Voltage: 11.90

CPU Temp: 52 deg
M/B Temp: 30 deg
Cpu Fan Spd: 4218RPM
Chip Fan SPd: 7336RPM
CPU Target Temp: 72 deg

Above seems regular to me, what u reckon?

 

hmm cant do that, however i should mention i have 2 drives, the SATA one is the one i always install windows on.

What i could do is install windows on the secondary drive instead if the problem occurs again. Maybe if its an hd error it would not occur if windows is installed on the other one. I also know through running chkdsk that there are 32kb in bad sectors on my primary hd, i believe these have been there for quite a while though. Should this be a cause for concern.

 

maybe i should post further on the hardware section i guess

 

Hi Tim,

I havent had any problems for a while since i posted this thread, until today. I installed norton ghost a while ago to take an image of my HD onto the second one to avoid all the reinstalling hassles if it had to happen again. I had succesfully created an image a week or two ago, but wished to create a complete one now that I have reinstalled everything.

Every time i try to take an image onto the secondary drive with norton ghost, at a point in time i will get a blue screen and the system will restart, first time it happened quite quickly, i went for a ciggy and heard pc restarting, tried it and turned monitor off, came back after around 6 minutes, as soon as i turned the monitor on, a blue screen appeared and it all restarted.

I tried it a 3rd time, monitoring it and moving mouse around occasionally to keep system alive etc. and at around 66% a blue screen appeared and it restarted, ran a chkdsk upon restart, and tried again, and this time the pc seemed to freeze after a while, ie. i could not move mouse pointer nothing, but the whole screen remained frozen, i had to turn my pc off and restart after this.

This concerned me the most as it is the same symptom i had before i eventually get the ntldr is missing message and have to reinstall. I am afraid this will happen soon although things are working fine so far. I have no idea why norton now refuses to work because i have instaleld more apps.