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Koogrr, I feel your pain with Impala.
My new computer is fast, but it's got problems, and I find myself looking longingly to my old computer in the corner. It may have been slow and clunky, but at least I could count on it not to crash. The new one has a habit of hard-locking an average of once per evening. Sometimes I'll make it through a night with no problems, but usually if it dies once, it will continue to do so.
Lut thought we should try looking at software solutions first, though there's one problem that I know is hardware: it won't restart. Ever. Hit the reset button, it turns itself off. Use the Windoze restart function, it turns itself off. Even more annoying, I can't manually turn it back on for a minimum of 30 seconds after it's powered itself off. If I try, it'll start to boot for three seconds, then power down again. I have to just let it sit for a while, then try.
Anyway, Lut found me a free word processor to replace Word: AbiWord, which is tres cool. It's opensource freeware designed to look almost identical to MS Word. Like MS Word, it spellchecks on the fly by doing the little red underlining thing, which I like because I hate running a spellcheck function and clicking 'Add word' or 'ignore' for the umpteen bazillion letter combinations I intentionally use and which its feeble dictionary doesn't contain. (For the record AbiWord thinks 'umpteen' is a word, but 'bazillion' and 'AbiWord' are not. Heh). It doesn't do grammar checking, which is fine with me because a computer program's idea of grammar drives me nuts.
Equally important, AbiWord has a word count function, which is essential to my Master Plan for writing my novel. (85 pages and counting!) At first I thought it didn't, because MS Word puts the word count under a 'properties' selection on the File menu. But Abi puts it under the Tools menu as 'Word Count', which makes more sense anyway. I am happy.
But my computer was not. It crashed last night while I was playing WC3. After that, I went through and downloaded all the 'critical updates' for Windoze XP, then went back to WC3. It crashed again. (This is doing nothing for my already sinking win-loss ratio, btw). On this crash, Lut finally managed to catch enough of the Blue Screen of Death to get to the part where it cites the problem file. (I've gotten a Blue Screen of Death three times now, filled with 'what to do if you get this more than once' instructions, which I'm sure would be very helpful if the computer didn't power itself down within 30 seconds of displaying it.) The file cited turned out to be a video driver. Lut found one that was more current (by a whole day) and downloaded it last night. So. Maybe it'll be working better today. *crosses fingers*
Lut thought we should try looking at software solutions first, though there's one problem that I know is hardware: it won't restart. Ever. Hit the reset button, it turns itself off. Use the Windoze restart function, it turns itself off. Even more annoying, I can't manually turn it back on for a minimum of 30 seconds after it's powered itself off. If I try, it'll start to boot for three seconds, then power down again. I have to just let it sit for a while, then try.
Anyway, Lut found me a free word processor to replace Word: AbiWord, which is tres cool. It's opensource freeware designed to look almost identical to MS Word. Like MS Word, it spellchecks on the fly by doing the little red underlining thing, which I like because I hate running a spellcheck function and clicking 'Add word' or 'ignore' for the umpteen bazillion letter combinations I intentionally use and which its feeble dictionary doesn't contain. (For the record AbiWord thinks 'umpteen' is a word, but 'bazillion' and 'AbiWord' are not. Heh). It doesn't do grammar checking, which is fine with me because a computer program's idea of grammar drives me nuts.
Equally important, AbiWord has a word count function, which is essential to my Master Plan for writing my novel. (85 pages and counting!) At first I thought it didn't, because MS Word puts the word count under a 'properties' selection on the File menu. But Abi puts it under the Tools menu as 'Word Count', which makes more sense anyway. I am happy.
But my computer was not. It crashed last night while I was playing WC3. After that, I went through and downloaded all the 'critical updates' for Windoze XP, then went back to WC3. It crashed again. (This is doing nothing for my already sinking win-loss ratio, btw). On this crash, Lut finally managed to catch enough of the Blue Screen of Death to get to the part where it cites the problem file. (I've gotten a Blue Screen of Death three times now, filled with 'what to do if you get this more than once' instructions, which I'm sure would be very helpful if the computer didn't power itself down within 30 seconds of displaying it.) The file cited turned out to be a video driver. Lut found one that was more current (by a whole day) and downloaded it last night. So. Maybe it'll be working better today. *crosses fingers*
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Actually, I'd recommend Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org/) as an M$-Office substitute.
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The reset button behaviour sounds like a bios setting. You may want to hunt around, but I have seen options for the reset in some BIOSs. They are typically something like shutdown, reset or suspend. It also probably wouldn't hurt if you made sure the jumper is on the right pins.
Impala, strangely, has been behaving although the only change of late was to remove a fan. Also, it's been less hot and humid. There was one very muggy day about 3 weeks ago when neither of my machines would run properly at all.
Also, you can set it so the BSOD writes to a file, along with the crash dump so get a little more than the 30 seconds to figure out what went wrong. I'm not sure where it is in WinXP, but could find out if you need. I've looked at a couple dmp files, and it generally doesn't tell anything useful, but you never know.
Anyhow, good luck!