Strange issues with laptop of a friend.

Jamie A mate of mine who fixes these things for a living, told me that anything XP and later, takes a 'snapshot' of the system that it's installed on, and allocates some laid-down points value to each piece of hardware in there, and this then 'defines' the machine that the OS is loaded on. Whenever any hardware changes are made, this definition is re-evaluated, and the points value alters. This is tolerated by Windows up until a certain amount, whereupon it finally decides that this is no longer the machine that it was originally installed on, and refuses to run any more. Supposed to be a pretty foolproof way of stopping pirating of Windows, I think. Could it be that your friend had made enough hardware changes since the original Windows installation, that he was very near the point where it was going to reject its 'host' as being a different machine, and the changing of the memory configuaration was the last straw that drove it past that point ?

He also told me that when he gets a machine in where this has happened, he phones MS, and they give him a new registration code or some such, which allows the OS to be reloaded with the new configuration. Might not be anything to do with it, or I might not have it quite right, but just a thought ??

Arfa

Jamie hath wroth:

I have no idea what happened. However, I have a guess that booting with the two 128MB SODRAM boards caused Windoze to crash and possibly scrambling the data on the drive. Sometimes Windoze can recover, sometimes not. If you can get it to boot to the inital boot screen (hit F8 during bootup), try "restore to last successful boot" or possibly "safe mode". If nothing works, boot the Windoze XP CDROM, select "install" and then "repair". That has saved my posterior a few times. If XP Home, also see:

However, first do some RAM testing. Go unto:

or

and create a bootable floppy or cdrom. If paranoid, remove the hard disk from the laptop before running. Boot one of these memory tester and convince yourself that the RAM is working. Any error are considered a failure. I run it several times, usually overnight, to be sure. Self-heating makes a big difference.

Also, if your friend's laptop is a Gateway 2900 series, or older Vaio, overheated RAM and extreme sensitivity to the brand and type of RAM are common.

That's correct, only last week it happened on my machine when, whilst having some network problem I deleted the drivers for the network card expecting Windoze to reinstall them on reboot. However what happened was that although the machine rebooted, a requester came up telling me that the computers hardware configuration had changed and the computer needed reauthorising which normally takes place by clicking on the screen, selecting authorise by phone which brings up a 50 digit (I think) code and a phone number. The whole process is automatic, you just follow the prerecorded instructions and bob`s yer uncle.

Seeing as the machine refuses to reboot, I don't think that`s the answer. I do have a memory stick that when fitted into any Windoze XP computer, causes that computer to fail to boot and shows something like "NDIS is Missing" on screen. refitting known good memory cures the problem. Maybe the OP`s problem is something along those lines

If it`s getting past the Windows welcome screen, it might be some device driver that`s failing to load, but a boot into Safe Mode should work. Sounds like a WinXP repair job is on the cards

Ron(UK)

Corrupted registry due to bad memory. Just because the memory passes the POST does not mean it's good.

I had a compaq desktop computer do this when I installed two sticks of PNY 512 m ram. After booting a few times with the original ram, XP began to load correctly. I took out the old stick and put in 1 stick of the PNY ram and the system booted. I then put in the second stick and it booted correctly with both sticks. This happened about 6 months ago and the system has worked fine since the install. Chuck

Bad memory. Almost 100% certain.

How could you remember that??? :)