I have a CPU that is a P4, HP machine that had XP loaded on it originally.

The young lady wanted it faster and cleaned up (Virus Haven) She had none of the original software. Nada, Zero, Zilch.

I had her buy a copy of XP Home SP2.

I added 2 new sticks of memory. Everything worked fine. Several days went buy before I wiped and tried the install of XP.

Upon installation of XP on the newly reformatted drive, right after the setup takes you through the keyboard choices and the product key entry and time zone settings, it goes back to finish the install and promptly reboots. At that point it goes back to the setup screen and starts all over at the "this will take 39 minutes"
redo the key, time etc.. This time it completes but has random reboot issues even when idle.

I have wiped it twice thinking the first time it was a fluke but it did the same thing twice.

I rebooted in safe mode and ran the machine for 24 hours with no reboot issues.

The video card is an older Nvidia TNT2 3800 and I installed the recommended driver from Nvidia but still reboots.

When I went to clean the CPU it was disgustingly caked with dust on the heatsink and when I went to pull it off one side was not clipped with the push to clamp clip. (if that makes sense)

Is it possible the CPU has heat damage? Is it still possible it is a memory issue- If so what can I use to check the memory other than pulling it one stick at a time.

Also when I try to connect to the windows update site through the start menu I get-

"Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience."
AppName: iexplore.exe AppVer: 60.0.2900.2180 ModName: mshtml.dll offset: 00083177

Help me please! Please forgive my ignorance.

Thanks Sticc

You can check the memory with memtest

http://www.memtest.org/#downiso

Though to be completely sure, running it with one stick would be definitive

As for the install, you probably didn't get round to loading all the programmes and do not have a lot of data on it, if so


Download and installEverest Home Edition

Run the programme, click + next to computer then summary

Look on right for storage / hard drive

Look at the manufacturer’s site for the hard drive utility

If you are unable to find it, please post the make and model here before you download anything

Do any cleaning you need to do first, then run the utility to check the drive, if that goes well, run the hard drive utility, write zeros to drive option, use its full version which could take 8 hours but this coupled with the drive fitness test will make sure there isn't anything wrong with the drive

On MemTest i got this:

Erroro found with word pair #73656697, 73656696 (either could be the source)

What now? Do the one stick at a time thing to isolate?

That would answer it