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XP hangs up, new install

S

spacelord

Platinum Member
I reloaded Xp Media Center edition on a friends computer. Its probably from 2007. It is the original XP discs that came with the Dell computer. It seems to hang quite a bit. Like it just goes off into la-la land and won't take any input. eventually it comes back.

Right now I'm trying to log in and its been at least 5 minutes and still not at desktop. If I let it sit I am 99% sure it will end up at the desktop within the next 15 minutes.

It was really bad at first install.. I got the chipset drivers installed in a controlled start by being patient by clicking on something walking away for a while then coming back. Yes controlled start exhibited the same problems. I thought I cured it. but now its back.

I updated the BIOS to the latest available on Dell support page. still no difference.

Is there any way to detect what is hanging the system? someone else before me tried to redo his computer and got a new hard drive. That obviously wasn't the problem.

I've got it all patched up with all/most of the Xp updates through Sp3.
maybe I need to apply the chipset drivers again.

I've installed plenty of 98/XP/Win7 systems and usually they run fine from a vanilla install.

Theres nothing funny in the BIOS that I can find.

Thanks.

I ran the system through Memtest and it passed that.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
throw a copy of win7 on there 30 day trial - could be a bad driver. win7 has most drivers for intel gear built in.
 
If you get to the desktop, try to check the Windows system log. Granted, it is usually full of mostly useless drivel, but there might be some type of recurrent warning or failure there that could point you towards what is causing the problem.

Since this computer is a few years old, I presume there is plenty of airflow through the power supply and that the CPU heatsink is clean? Also, have you checked the motherboard to see if there are any obvious swelled capacitors there? Might also be worth trying to swap out the SATA cable on the hard drive as well.
 
you may have a bad or incompatible dvdrw or hard drive. when i tried to load win 7 with a new sony drive it would hang. i changed to a pioneer and it loaded fine. another time i installed win xp on a hard drive just fine but when running it would hang. it was a bad drive
 
For openers go into safe mode then bring up MSCONFIG and disable everything in startup. You can also use MSCONFIG as a diagnostic in that you can readily disable/re-enable various processes/tasks/file types (eg, .ini)/drivers or whole group of these for problem isolation purposes.

There are a variety of other approaches which can also be used such as using Event Viewer and/or forcing a screen list of what is being loaded during boot to determine what is attempting to be loaded when the system hangs, but the MSCONFIG analysis/diagnostic will do for now.
 
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