Is my comp a lemon?

[Brian]

Hello
I have a Dell Dimension XPS. Pentium 4 HT, 3.00
gigahertz. 2 gigabyte DDR SDRam/200 gigabyte hard
drive. ATI Radeon 9800 Pro w/ DVI

MS Windows XP Home SP1 is installed on this machine.

My problem is twofold:

1. After having the computer off for awhile, ie. out of
town or in bed, then turning the comp on the machine will
get to the user logon screen then restart again. This
happens sometimes 2 to 5 times before I can actually
logon to my desktop.

2. While in the middle of a program, IE, Musicmatch,
Winamp, games(online or w/o internet connection),
Encyclopedia, I will get booted out of the program to the
desktop or to a blue screen or sometimes the computer
will even do a restart.

I do not have the technical error codes at this time but
after talking with Dell techs and trying different tests,
all coming up as passing, we decided to do a debug and a
full reformat. Dell blames the XP OS but I am starting
to think there might be an actual hardware problem.

Any ideas? Perhaps someone out there has a similar setup
with similiar problems? I do not have a lot experience
with computers but I do know there is a problem here and
would like to know if it can be fixed.

Thank you for reading this and helping.
Brian

[Bob Day]

"Brian" > wrote in message
...
> Hello
> I have a Dell Dimension XPS. Pentium 4 HT, 3.00
> gigahertz. 2 gigabyte DDR SDRam/200 gigabyte hard
> drive. ATI Radeon 9800 Pro w/ DVI
>
> MS Windows XP Home SP1 is installed on this machine.
>
> My problem is twofold:
>
> 1. After having the computer off for awhile, ie. out of
> town or in bed, then turning the comp on the machine will
> get to the user logon screen then restart again. This
> happens sometimes 2 to 5 times before I can actually
> logon to my desktop.
>
> 2. While in the middle of a program, IE, Musicmatch,
> Winamp, games(online or w/o internet connection),
> Encyclopedia, I will get booted out of the program to the
> desktop or to a blue screen or sometimes the computer
> will even do a restart.
>
> I do not have the technical error codes at this time but
> after talking with Dell techs and trying different tests,
> all coming up as passing, we decided to do a debug and a
> full reformat. Dell blames the XP OS but I am starting
> to think there might be an actual hardware problem.
>
> Any ideas?

I would suspect hardware also. You may have already
run a memory test, but many of them aren't much good.
Try downloading memtest86 from
http://www.memtest86.com and running that for a few
passes. You should get zero errors. Also, you might
tell us the tests you've already done so we don't retrack
the same ground.

-- Bob Day