Crash? Sreious??

[AndrewSchofield]

I was busy working away at my pc when a message popped up saying my program had experienced a serious error and had to close. Not particularly unusual, but about 1second later, the pc switched itself off and the screen went black. It automatically re-booted, and appeared to load into windows fine and another window popped up to tell me that the system had recovered from a serious error. It appears it hasn't in fact 'recovered' at all.

Whilst windows looks to have loaded fine, nothing works - i cannot open any files or applications, I can't even open 'my computer' or 'control panel'. I've just tried to 'log off' and it appeared to do nothing, but it now seems as though it was doing it, just very slowly (took about 10minutes to 'log off'). Given that I can't get in to 'my computer' or 'control panel', i'm at a bit of a loss as where to start to sort this one out?

I've tried re-booting, pressing F8 and selecting 'last known configuration that worked' but that doesn't help?

I'm running XP Pro with service pack 2.

Any suggestions?

 

[gregers]

get it into safe mode then do a complete scan.

 

[Monsterminty]

if you can get into safe mode (with or without networking), go to the start menu>all programs>accessories>RUN and type msconfig in the box and hit return/enter. this will bring up a box, go to services !!make sure you tick the hide all microsoft services box!! then click disable all, then click the startup tab and disable all there too. click apply and ok. it will ask for a restart, do this, if you have functionality run any virus scanner you have, and if you can download malwarebytes http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/malwarebytes_free
and scan with that too.

THEN run the msconfig again and turn on one service/startup at a time until you have a problem, this will help you isolate the problem (if there is no virus malware etc).

let me know how it goes.