PC dont boot

[Mugekuge]

A friend is asking me about a problem with his pc, after the initial boot screens it freezes, he tried to run a windows xp boot CD and it says checking your hardware then freezes too, pc is a Intel dual core 1.6, 1024 ram, normal ide hdd, he doesn't know if was a virus, so far i think is the hdd although when he enters to the bios setup it shows the hdd but on third slave, i will try to get more info from him later today, any help is appreciated.

Thx.

[MisterBob]

It's pretty hard to help with something as generic as this. But I'd take out any extraneous hardware and see if you can boot with just the essentials to help rule out hardware issues.

[Shuemue]

www.ultimatebootcd.com

grab that, burn to cd, boot from it and then run all the hardware diagnostics.

[Mugekuge]

Thx, i told him to download and run the cd, i got more info of his pc:

Processor Intel Pentium Dual – Core E2140 (1.6 Ghz, 800 FSB, 1MB L2)

HDD 160 GB SATA 7200 RPM

Ram memory 1GB, DDR II, 533 Mhz

Mother Board INTEL 945-GC with sound and video on board.

[Norellicus]

Is he overclocking anything (memory especially)?

I've seen bad memory stepping do this sort of thing before.

[Mugekuge]

Is his work pc, i am sure he hasnt overclocked, he even used optimize settings on bios configuration, he is running the tests atm, so far he says no errors on hdd or board.

[Shuemue]

Could easily be a bad stick of ram

[Mugekuge]

Could easily be a bad stick of ram

Thx for this, i told him to bring me the pc, i changed the ram of slot and pc is working now, but i asked him better get a new memory, probably will fail again.

[Shuemue]

could have just had dust on the contact, and if it was an actual fault, it's more likely to be the mobo than the ram if changing the slot worked