XP wont boot

I got a machine here-its a presario 5190. It has 2 instances of XP installed, and it wont boot to either one. The owner said he tried to install a printer, and then when he rebooted, it got caught in a loop, and just contnues to restart itself. It wont start in safe mode, and it wont start with the last known good configuration. I tried a repair install, but that didnt seem to work either. It just reboots endlessly, right after XP starts loading. Any suggestions ?? I suspect the computer doesnt have enough memory for XP. I believe XP requires a minium of 256MB, and I believe this has only 192 MB RAM. I believe that the best option is to reformat, and install Win 98. The guy that owns this doesnt even have it on the internet-just uses it for his trip planner, and some games. Any thoughts on the subject?? Thanks for all the input!!!
thyme

 

Reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling the OS will cure all problems that are not hardware related - you just lose all your data. XP does need 256 megs to run well, but it will run with less. RAM is cheap, so why not add 256 more? The reboot is not from not enuf ram, the computer will use the hard drive for virtual memory to add to the ram to get XP to run I believe. You could also do the win98 route or they could just get a PalmPilot...doc

 

It will run OK on 192, so that is certainly not the reason for the reboots.

But since it has someone else's stuff on it, why not just install cleanly. At least then any problems that come up will be your own and not from a previous user. It's hard enough to try to trace back your own activities on the machine to try to remember if something you did may have caused a problem without having to guess at another person's activities.

 

i run win xp pro on pentium 2 with 187 mg ddr ram no problems sounds like a hard drive problem try a scandisk through dos or get a low level format utility try that

 

ok-thanks-I'll look in that direction. Appreciate the input!!!!!

 

yw dood