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We've got 2 pc systems here on pulsar - sfp 3.1c and winXPpro both disposing the strangest, highly unstable, behaviour. All of a sudden we get black screens and the computer goes into a loop of contious rebooting :-/ This is not the looping we are after...

I also installed ASPI 4.7x as adviced, made sure that 3.1c drivers were installed... Before, on my previous computer, I worked with pulsar and win2000 without any problem.... Now both computers have AMD processors 1600+ and 3200+ and winXPpro.

Does anyone recognize these symptoms?
Is there anyone with a stable configuration on XPpro?

I really could need some advice now.

Yes, I do recognize it, because I have been into something similar not long ago. You may have a Troyan in your computer, or perhaps you have a double boot system with some BMR overwriting problems. Otherwise, it could be a hardware problem.

Just some suggestions:
Unplug everything; expect your main HD and your video card. Then restart your system. If it started fine, then continue with your second drive, then switch off again, install your PCI cards, one by one, and test every time your switch on, till you find some trouble.

Don’t let the computer there, restarting itself for a long time, it may cause harm to hardware cos of the interrupt of electricity. When you switch off your computer, there is always some electricity remaining still into the circuitry, and you should not restart it immediately after you have switched it off, but after a few seconds.

If you could describe a bit what you have installed there, that would be a good point.

Win XP:
Indeed, there are hundreds of us with stables systems and Win XP Pro, no problems. I have it myself and it runs really well. I have a double boot system, so not to mess with other applications, this gives me a very fast and responsive system.

Hope you can solve your problem soon...

Well Nestor, I started doing this: only HD and video (there's no dual booting and the system was clean installed)... And the problem persisted!

It might be the video card. I already had a slight idea. The moment of black out is never the same but when cyclic rebooting the PC blacks out when the 32bit signal is expected. I'm still waiting on my final videocard: a FX5200 twinview...

Will be continiued soon

can you list the systems' specs? things like the mobo model is very important, but try to provide as much info as possible.

Mmmm this is bezarre...

Have you the posibility to find a friend video card or something? That will inmediately tell you if your video card is bad or not.

If you have don e clean install, you have nothing to lose if you kill your drive, and then format it again, with a good app for it, specialy designed for XP.

If you were to do it, here you have the program and the procedure:

Go to this link
http://support.seagate.com/dweula
Then clik "I agree" for the agreement, fill in the form and register yourself, (you should have a seagate HD, but if you do not, past this ST38421A in "Drive model number". Go in, donwload the software, install it into any computer, and then create the DiscWizard discs. Go, insert the disc number 1 into the floppy drive, wait till it is load, then insert the number 2. The program will display an interface. Read carefully all what it tells you about the different options. There is an option to zero fill your drive, killing any posible problem. Then format your drive with it, it has a special feature to format your drive for better performance, for XP, or even XP SP1. Extremely good quality and reliable software to me.

NOTE: I don't think you are braking any law using this software, not having a Seagate drive, I have read carefully what they say, and there is nothing that impedes you to use it, so It's ok.