Help needed pleassse! This might be a bit long, but I would really appreciate any help. I only have a basic knowledge of computers so plz bear with me. I bought an Acer Travelmate recently and its specs are as follows: Pentium M 735 1.6Ghz 400Mhz FSB 2MB L2 cache RAM: 1 gig Video: ATI Mob Radeon 9700. Os: Windows XP Home service pack 2 Direct X 9.0 c While initially turning out alright, the notebook began locking up when running 3d games (Sims2, LOTR, age of Mythology etc.), where in these cases, I had to restart manually. Over several days, the notebook randomly crashed (while running games and even when web surfing), displaying a bluescreen. Now most of the time the bluescreen would disappear before im able to read anything. But, I wuz able to take down sum of the errors displayed.Among them: PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA, BEGIN MEMORY DUMP IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL I was told to upgrade my video to the Omega drivers and this only caused further problems where the notebook would fail to boot. After reinstalling both windows and my bios etc, the notebook began working fine, until a few days later where it would again crash randomly, especially during gaming. At times it would take several attempts to boot, locking up during random stages of booting windows. I know its not an overheating problem as the temp remains low. Any advice would be sincerely welcomed thx!
just finished talking to a friend about your problem, he says it is either hardware caused example was his external mouse was dying or a game with none of the patches loaded & age of mythology has patches needed to run right or you get what you have now. you might have to blow out drive & reload windows from scratch, do all the updates than load games & do their updates
Hello, Was this a 'previously-enjoyed' notebook, or did you purchase it new? Either way, it is probably all full o' crap and not setup properly... So, is it a clean, fresh install of XP Home SP2? I am constantly charged with repairing computers facing challenges similar to yours, and typically they are all full o' junk - they have all kinds of stuff that they Startup on boot, a fleet of TSRs in Localmachine/Run (things in the registry that start when your PC does), not to mention spyware/adware/trojans/malware etc. that have wandered in. These machines are technically not beyond repair, but the time & effort required are large, and results not guaranteed. For guaranteed results I must start from scratch, which means BIOS, which may or may not require updating (flashing) but almost always is not set up perfectly. Once set up and showing A:\ prompt, the Windows or other OS can be introduced. A clean, fresh XP install is followed by security mods from Gibson Research ShieldsUp: http://www.grc.com These are: DCOMbob, ShootTheMessenger, and unPnP. Spybot S&D is then installed and updated, and Internet Explorer immunized against (more than 2200) threats. Bad downloads are set to be blocked without notification. Windows update is next. Select Custom Install; select Review and install other updates. Install any high-priority updates listed. I personally believe SP2 is to be avoided, since it breaks a lot of older, homemade, grey-market or obscure programs of dubious ancestry, which I use to backup DVDs or recode them, or transcode them to MPEG4 (DivX) or MPEG1 (VCD). It breaks a lot of newer, big-$$ programs too - they are listed on http://support.microsoft.com/xpsp2swhw Once you have a clean fresh OS install, you must then be very careful what software you install! Typically, PCs I see all have Quicktime, Nero, Real, Office, WMP, AntiVirus, and goodness knows what else, all lurking and checking every 5 seconds to see if you are connected online and if there are any updates - this is EVIL. Test this yourself! CTRL/ALT/DEL and select the Performance panel of Task Manager. I have seen systems so busy, just sitting there (technically doing nothing) that their CPU Usage never falls below 10%! XP itself is plagued with all sorts of automatic stuff that monitors in the background, just waiting for you to plug in a digital camera or whatever - take a look in AdministrativeTools > Services and see what's running automatically. A lot of old-timers will tell you, and I quote, "You can have my Windows2000 when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers" because they are knowledgable and have no use for all the automatic trickery. WinXP (and especially the SP2 variant) is designed for n00bies and those who have never heard of a DOS prompt... Which is fine, but you better have at least 2000MHz and 512MB, and huge HDs, and don't do anything especially demanding (ie. Games, D3D or OpenGL). Alas, I rant (to no avail) and I haven't even touched on Device Drivers or Chipset Drivers ie. Via 4in1, SiS, Intel etc... But, what about your Acer Travelmate, what's its specific problem? Dunno. But based on the 'prevention is the best cure' theory, you should start over, beginning with the BIOS setup as I have described. To quote Engineer Montgomery Scott (StarTrek), "The more complicated they make the plumbing, the easier it is to stop-up the drain!" The Microsoft guys are under tremendous pressure to come up with new stuff to get you to purchase their latest OS, for big $$. Remember their advertising campaign that compared someone running Win98 to a guy whose beloved old LaZBoy chair was all ratty & duct-taped together: "If you think this chair is OK, then you probably think you don't need WinXP". Sure, you need your OS installed clean & fresh - but it doesn't have to be a new OS; it could simply be a new install of your current OS!! This will provide 99% of the improvements to which they allude. Honestly, no home-user really NEEDS more than Office97, or Windows98SE w/ 512MB. If you NEED a GB ram, you probably actually do need NT (ie. Win2000/WinXP). But life sure was a lot simpler with 20th century OS's, simple & streamlined... When I build a fleet of PCs from scratch, my biggest challenge is now installing & configuring the OS. Used to be, when it showed C:\ - ship it out! Not any more. So good luck to you JulieKay. Pay someone knowledgable $100 bucks to setup your machine properly, if it is within your means... it is money well spent.
