Today, Dave asks:

I am having a problem installing win xp on my laptop. It gets as far as the blue screen saying to install on the selected drive press enter, to repair existing windows press R. When I press any of these the laptop just keeps rebooting hope you can help, it’s driving me crazy.

My first stop, assuming your BIOS are set properly, would be to download and burn the Ultimate Boot CD ISO to a CD for immediate use. I would then start off with running a memory test with the already installed on the CD, Memtest86 program. If this turns up nothing, bearing in mind it will take many hours to run most likely, then it is time to move onto the next tool. Depending on which brand of hard drive you have installed (see manual for type), I would test things out with one of the hard drive diagnostic tools found here. If SMART is not tossing any errors at you, then it is most likely a memory error.

And finally, I toss this out to the community for some ideas. Any other thoughts as to what might be happening? Hit the comments, share your thoughts on the matter.

Do you have an IT-related question? Perhaps you are just burnt out on writing on the walls with crayons? Whatever the comments may be, drop me a line, and you too can “Just Ask Matt!”

Tags: notebook, motherboard, hard drive, ram