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#1
Various programs "have stopped working" + other probs
Hi all. I'm pretty much at my wits end with this problem now, and it seems, bizarrely, to have followed me from one machine to another. Here's a rundown:
My old machine(emachines e3042 - 2GB ram - Celeron D 3.2ghz - ATI Radeon X300) was running just fine with XP up until a few months ago. Then i noticed that all of a sudden certain programs would not open, and when i booted up all i would see is my wallpaper and no icons or taskbar. So after several formats and fresh installs(onto several different hard-drives) of XP, virus and spy/malware checks(avg & Spybot), i decided to see if upgrading to Win 7 would help me. Whilst it certainly erased the missing taskbar and icon problem, i slowly started to have the same problem come back, certain programs would not open, and this time on Windows 7, I would get an error message. The programs would work once and function perfectly after they installed, then would not open thereafter.
The programs it would do this on were:
Google Earth
Chrome
Firefox
Games for Windows Live applet
Tinker, solitaire and all other pre-installed games
So having tried several more fresh installs of Win 7, i eventually broke down and bought a new system and just chalked it down to the other system being quite old and probably dying slowly. I wanted something a little faster anyways.
My new machine: Zoostorm Pentium dual core E6300 2.8GHz - 4GB ram. I removed the Radeon X300 from my old machine and placed it in this new machine as i wanted the DVI port and it seemed to cope well with Windows aero. This machine came with no OS, so i installed Windows 7 straight on. All installed fine, and finally i was able to use the programs which gave me so much grief. All was going fine until after a few hours: Windows 7 would freeze completely, forcing me to power off at the mains. This happened several times last night, and i tried all manner of fixes and driver updates, but no joy. This morning after the first freeze up, i popped out the graphics card and reverted to the on board graphics to see if it made a difference. An hour went by, then all of a sudden while surfing i get the blue screen with some message that i did not get a chance to read. The PC reboots itself, so I then go to open google chrome(one of the problem programs) and to my disbelief, i get the error message "Google Chrome has stopped working" that i had been plagued with on my old system!
So right now, i cannot do anything on this system, as after so long, it will randomly blue screen and reboot. I'm back to where i was with my old machine, only this time it's worse with the random crashing, and I probably didn't even need to buy this new machine.
How is this possible for a problem to follow me from one machine to another, on separate OS', and separate hard drives?