constant restarting

[rtrottie]

A lady gave me a emachine and the computer looks good,but is booting up
okay.Until it gets to the windows log screen,then it restarts over and over.I
do not have the restore disks.And all my software is old,i still have my Windows ME cd and boot disk,but either is a help.The O/S on the computer is windows xp.What can i do? the model is emachine T1100.

thanks

[NooNoo]

Will it boot into safe mode?
A far few viruses will exhibit those symptoms... or it might be just a corrupt boot and it is actually going into a BSOD and automatically rebooting...Safemode more often than not will bypass the problem and allow you to turn off the automatic restart and then you can post the actual blue screen error you are getting.

You could pull the drive and do a virus check on your own machine... it may even have the restore as a partition you can get to by pressing a key combo at boot up.. F10 or F11?

Wow the spec on that is low xp with 128mb ram?

Final thought, if you put the hard drive in another machine or you can get into safe mode, see if you have the i386 folder which has all the .cab files in it.. if so you can repair the install from that... copy the files to a cd to back them up first though.

[Ferrit]

Likely it could also be a bad memory issue.

[rtrottie]

hOw do you turn off the automatic restart,and i am thinking of putting win98 on this computer.Can i format ? or fdisk the existing o/s?

[NooNoo]

Just put some more RAM in it.... that would make it run ok... but it will also run with 98... finding drivers might be fun
You turn off automatic restart by right clicking my computer, select properties, click the advanced tab, then the start up and recovery button, 2/3rds the way down, uncheck the box automatically restart.... and that's if you can get into safemode.

Try battering the f8 key before windows starts - there may be an option to turn it off there.

[rtrottie]

I have found my old Dos disk 6.0,which reformats the hard drive,so i load Win 95 and then upgrade to Win Me.The computer boots up very good,and runs fast.But when you use the old Dos disks it only see harddrives 2.0 mb,so i am losing a lot of space.Is there anyway to recover this space? also my mouse will not work.I went is setup to enable the mouse still noting and then i choose
auto- and the mouse still does not work.

[NooNoo]

Yes, use the Win ME disk to format and run the setup. An upgrade disk will do a full install - you just need to feed it the Win95 disk when it asks.

The problem is that the fdisk version - the bit that does the partitioning is older and doesn't know that bigger disks are available. You can get a bootdisk from www.bootdisk.com which has a newer version. You can also partition and format with the hard drive manufacturer's tools.

As for the mouse, is it usb or ps2 or comport?

[rtrottie]

You mean i just put the Win Me cd in the drive,go to run and type setup?
Also the mouse is a ps2 mouse.

[NooNoo]

Pretty much, but you will need a boot floppy disk for windows me... again www.bootdisk.com will allow you to download one... double click the download with a floppy disk in to create the disk automatically.

more details on how to here

The ps2 mouse port might have died... do you have another mouse to check? On some older machines you can't push the plug in far enough so you should check the collar around the plug is not preventing the ps2 plug going all the way in.