Rant: I Hate XP; What a Piece of Shit!
 

So last night I spent a few hours working on my son's PC which runs Windows XP. Seems he keeps getting a "Serious Error Has Occured" message whenever he starts it up and then the system restarts itself within minutes of the error. So the virus checker is up to date, all the Service Packs have been applied; now what to do? It also works fine in "safe mode with networking" so I am stumped.

After doing research on Google, it seems there must be a really old driver which is conflicting with other drivers or systems files. So now I'll got to do major research on the drivers to figure out which ones are causing the problem. Check! Upgrade! Remove! Well, all I can say is that XP is one big hunk of shit!

I've been running Mandravia Linux on my desktop for almost two years now and never -- yes never -- has the operating system gone down. I've had individual programs crap out but the OS has always been there.

I switched after I was getting about 10-15 virus infected emails a day! I knew that eventually I would open one by accident and potentially have my PC ruined. I've never had a virus with Linux and even if I received one there is not much likely hood I would open it because of the way the OS is designed. [You need a special root password to do important stuff , anyways I've got a Linux virus checker too.] I bought a program called Crossover Office which allows me to use some MS Windows stuff I need like Dreamweaver and Photoshop. Oh yeah, did I say that Linux was free as in the source code is available to all and you can download it or get it from a magazine CD/DVD for free? You can even run Windows along side of Linux though I stopped doing that on my system a long time ago.

I am a happy man with Linux and I will never give Bill Gates another dime for the garbage this man puts out!!!

Thank you for your time. Okay I am done.


---art

Not that this will fix your error, but did you go to:
control panel, system,advanced tab, startup & recovery settings button at bottom, uncheck automatically restart

This should keep the computer from rebooting after an error

Thank you. I will try that!

If you can get into safe mode then you are probably correct about the driver issue - but it would be good to go through the step by step loading of the drivers (one of the options on startup) and see which is causing you the problem - the other thing would be to once you have the reboot on error turned off - let it come up with the error - then go to the control panel, system and look at the hardware and see if any have a red x or yellow question mark on them - that would indicate which driver is "probably" giving you the error also.
Unfortunately there are some programs out there that dont have real compatible drivers for XP - especially programs you can download as freeware/shareware - and those can cause the same type of error as well

The last thing I would check if those dont find it - is to get something like hijackthis off the web - and run it to see if there is a hijacker thats causing that error - its always a possibility and most virus scanners and spyware scanners wont pick up a lot of these

you took my response, good call.

I got a secondhand computer about a year ago with XP installed. It had a few problems, plus I found I did not like XP. The easiest way I found to fix XP is:

1. Format your drive.

2. Get out your old Windows 98 disk.

3. Install Windows 98.

(Of course a better solution for point 3 is to install a proper OS such as Linux (such a shame there is no PC equivalent to Workbench/Kickstart) but unfortunately I need to keep a couple of machines that can use Windows software.)

:)