computer issues

So my brother in law is having issues with this computer, and I'm trying to help him out. What is happening is:

• his computer will always restart after a random amount of time. longests it usually stays on is about 10 minutes.
  
• when it boots up and begins to load windows, it tends to take a long time (5 minutes plus).
  
• alot of the time it won't even completely boot up, and will instead restart before it finishes.
  
• safe mode generally results in more successful boot ups, but it still takes a long time and will eventually crash.

The computer doesn't run long enough to perform a virus scan. So, any ideas what it could be?

 

Spyware/Registry Errors/ Virus/ Startup Program Buildup/ An idiot using a computer.

 

De-frag.

 

Could be a heat problem. Are the fans working and the vents unblocked?

 

Yeah, thats what I was thinking. Only thing is the computer isn't on long enough to beable to do a malware/virus scan. Is it possible to connect my laptop to it and run a scan through that? Or would that put my laptop in too much danger?

 

Yeah, fans are working and unblocked. The entire side panel is off also.

 

Malware scans shouldn't take longer than a couple of minutes.

Do a registry scan as well. You should have enough time for that.

Have you tried to restore your computer?

 

The best bet when shit gets that real is just to say 'fuck it' and format the drive. Backup all your shit first and it'll be good as new in less than an hour.

 

Check the documentation for your installed AV software and see if theres an option to get in and schedual a boot time scan so the scan will happen prior to windows and whatever bug is messing with you from running.

***Rubin, I see you've never run Spybot S&D before.
Couple of minutes?! Is your Computer named Deep Thought by any chance?

 

Spybot sucks.

 

As a stand alone product, most anti malware apps do.

 

You mean the computer that took seven and a half million years to calculate the answer to a question it didn't know ?

 

No.

 

Now you're just trying to be contrary for the fun of it.

 

No.

 

There you go again!!

 

Thanks for the responses everybody.

I went to my bro in laws place to remotely access his computer for a virus scan through my laptop, but i couldn't even boot his computer. The computer kept saying that a couple files were missing or corrupt. He had a few files that had to be replaced, boot.ini, some system config file, and yet another that I can't quite remember.

We had to download a copy of XP, since his copy went missing, to try to copy the files onto his computer. Of course I wasn't able to copy those files onto his computer, I think it was the version we downloaded. System Repair wouldn't do anything either. We tried a few other things also which again didn't work.

So eventually we got frustrated and said "fuck it", and we wiped the damn computer lol. Of course this was always the easy way out, but he had stuff on his harddrive he didn't want to get rid of.

Anyways, thats that. Thanks again everyone!

 

A live boot cd and a usb flash drive and you could of kept all the files he wanted.


~shakes head.

 

Just install Ubuntu. Fuck Windows. You'll never have to deal with nine tenths of that shit ever again (assuming you know what you're doing at least a little bit).

</shamelessplug>