I have an old xp pro tower here that i watch off to my left while I work, it's One i put together long ago. two days ago i decided to try avast on it and it's been useless ever since. I have a hard wire to 40 down 20 service. i mostly watch the news on it and sometimes the wife logs into facebook. it is terribly missed.
Here is what it is doing, when I turn it on it goes to black screen, gives me a choice of reg XP or recovery but will not boot into recovery, xp boots all the way to the user Icon, after that is pushed windows boots and I have about 14 seconds or so of time that I can choose something to click, the mouse moves fine even after the system freezes, I cannot turn the computer off , even with the hard shut down button on front, I have to unplug it. I cannot type anything, I can barely select anything, I have made it all the way to the populated remove software screen but it freezes just a second after I push Uninstall on avast. ( believe me it's not easy to even get that far, I have only done it twice in 30 attempts.
also I forgot to mention, after the black screen with the choice of reg xp or recovery ( This screens only on for approx 4 seconds by the way) at the bottom it says F8 for trouble shooting but no matter how fast I am I cannot select that, even if I hold down the entire time to chose it It will not go there, then it goes to the f2 screen to set up, Every single time. there is not much to change in cmos on this old thing. I set it to Recommended out of convenience now since nothing seems to work. It boots to the user name Icon screen after that. and that is where my 14 seconds of quick clicking can occure before it freezes up and I have to unplug it to try again.
I have tried to use the xp disk to reload the OP system but it will not boot. I even tried my old Hierems boot CD i did get it to go in but I have either forgotten how to use that or it is only allowing me to be In the disk, I cannot access the remove software, it clean the registry or check for viruses,
This is sad for me, I have a lot of files on this system from the old days , i am sure I can pull the drives and get my stuff off with another system but Id really like to recover the set up that is on it. does anyone know what has happened and how I can reverse it?
also in the 14 sec I have made to to system restore but it freezes up after I select a point.
