My emachines CRASHED, 2nd time in a week, my PC tech doesnt know what to do, help????

Question

About a week and a half ago, i was on yahoo checking my emails and playing a c.d. through windows media player when my 3 year old Emachines T6412 popped up a window saying that my anti virus AVG had downloaded a new update and needed to restart my system. The window had a 58 second timer on it, saying it would restart automatically, or 'click yes to restart now'... no option to cancel. After it shut down, it tried to start back up, but only got as far as the windows XP logo, then looped to it over and over. I called my PC tech, and rushed him over to my house. At this point he hooked up the hard drive he kept, [a mirror of mine] and booted it up from there, and it worked fine, so we assumed the problem was fixed. Today, about 10 mins. ago, while watching a video on youtube and again checking my yahoo emails, my computer froze completely [mouse non-responding, Ctrl+Alt+Del not working, song looping 1sec of audio, the whole works]. i pressed and held the power button, shut it down, let it sit for a few minutes, then tried starting it back up... it went to Win. XP logo/loading screen, then froze there! What could it be? i need to fix this computer... it's been faithfully running these 3 years, i'll buy any part needed to fix this, i just need to know what is wrong....

Answer 1

Might be bad sector on the hard drive where the OS is written. Run a chkdsk and see if it flags the bad sectors. Use your tech's mirror disk to boot and run until you can get a new hard drive if chkdsk shows bad sectors.

Answer 2

Will it could be a bad sector, run scandisk/chkdsk.. It could also be a result of neglect, although I doubt it in your case, you have a tech guy & call him. Have you deleted programs instead of Uninstalling them?

Check registries for errors.

3 years.. RAM too could cause some problems. Try replacing your RAM & see if it helps. Also since your drive is mirrored, I assume data is safe, try running a recovery once...

We are all just shooting in the dark here.. Its computers & about a 1000 things could be possible here.. We are just looking for most likely cause her. Some of us would blame OS( M$ being the favorite bad guy for all & sundry because its so BIG, same as with apple now) or H/W, which has been running for 3 years now..

Answer 3

Sounds like your hard drive could be failing,,,

also try installing more memory,,can never have enough,,

Good luck,

Answer 4

Isn't your PC Tech available to pop over again?   Seems he would be the best person to solve this since he already knows your system.

Answer 5

i dont agree by the above answers

in my opinion nothing is wrong

just reinstall your window or

boot the computer in safe mode and uninstall avg antivirus

reboot in normal mode and again install a fresh copy from net

good luck