I have a 3 year old HP Pavilion, running Win XP. 258 megs RAM, as far as I know all the service packs are current and I do run Ad-aware and Spybot, well I try to remember to do it weekly but it probably is more like every other week. I have McAfee though my free AOL broadband account.
Last week when I booted up the comp, it started acting funny, kept restarting itself at different points in the startup sequence. Finally I somehow got it booted in full and it told me it had "recovered from a serious error" and microsoft told me it was my RAM and recommended I run a program "Windows Memory Diagnostic". I planned on doing it later, but then started having another problem.
A day or two later I booted up as usual and after a few minutes, the graphics driver (Intel 82845G/GL/GE/PE/GV) stopped working, and gave me an error message to restart and that it would tell me what to do upon the restart. When I restarted it, it told me that the problem was the graphics driver needed to be updated/reinstalled, so I went to the Intel website and downloaded the correct driver and installed it. This fixed the problem.....for a few days.
Yesterday it was doing the same thing-restarting itself over and over when I tried turning it on, and I could only get it open in safe mode and had it revert back to a checkpoint for Saturday, which was what worked last week, if I recall correctly. The graphics driver has gone down, or windows has told me that the error was due to a device driver a few times. But the new driver is installed and seems to be working-I can see the icon in the tray as I type this.
I've reached the end of my own computer expertise at reinstalling the driver. If that's not working, I'm not sure what to do. I'm not sure if the problem is really something with the RAM or if it's the driver, but I've gotten the driver error many times and the RAM one once, before the driver problem started happening. I'm not sure what could have happened to set this off either, I haven't installed any new programs in the last few weeks. The last thing I installed was a Flickr uploader, and that was at the beginning of September. If you have any advice on how to get this error to stop recurring, I'd love to hear it. Thank you.
