Compter startup issues.. worrying me badly.

[Icewall42]

So yesterday morning I woke up to a broken Windows. Something like the the mup.sys file went missing so that Windows refused to get off the loading the screen. I ended up having to repair my Windows install without reformatting, since I have so much data. I got into Windows fine after I did that. Now, this morning, my PC wouldn't even get past the boot screen. Ususally it does that if my iPod is plugged in, but it wasn't this time. I could not get into the BIOS or the Boot Screen. Finally I just unplugged my PC and cleared the electricity out of it and plugged it back in, and it booted up just fine.

I have:

ECS Nforce4 Socket 939 Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 3000+
2gigs of Corair Value Select RAM
Radeon X800XL 256mbs
A Western Digital 200gig SATA hard drive
An X-Fi XtremeGamer Soundcard (with the 2 megs of RAM)

Should I be afraid to turn this thing off again before I'ved backed everything up?

 

[RoBo]

Yes you should back everything up. Sounds like it is time for a fresh install of XP.

 

[digital_exhaust]

Should I be afraid to turn this thing off again before I'ved backed everything up?

You really should have all of your important data backed up regardless of your system's stability....

And if I were experiencing the problems that you describe, I would start by checking my ram by running memtest for at least 24 hours.... And as advised above, a clean install wouldn't hurt either......

 

[Icewall42]

Hmmm yes, I've been lagging on my backups... I really should have had them for instances like this. Well, the computer is currently stable, so I think I'll start the backup and just reformat.

I've been wondering about the memory, since I've added a gig this past year. I ran Memtest on it for a number of hours with no errors, and tried running the Benchmark '06 program to see if anything had issues, but no errors there either...

Well, if I'm still havin problems after reformating, time to thoroughly check the hardware.