Comp freezes, can't enter safe mode

[Kyle]

My comp has been freezing ever since I got a trojan dialer
in a volume system information file which I (probably
wrongly) deleted when it couldn't be repaired. It freezes
usually when I run programs that require a lot of memory
and sometimes when nothing is running at all and the
longest its gone without freezing is about an hour. My
system specs are win xp home, athlon 1.3 ghz, 256 mb ddr
ram, a seagate harddrive that was almost full when the
crashing started but I removed enough that defrag runs.

I've defragged twice, used the winxp cd to try and repair
windows, ran norton disk doctor to remove errors, can't
run Sisoft's sandra diagnostic tool b/c it freezes.

Does anyone know how I can figure out what the problem is,
whether its a hardware or software issue, or am I just
going to have to reformat my harddrive?

 

[Malke]

My comp has been freezing ever since I got a trojan dialer
in a volume system information file which I (probably
wrongly) deleted when it couldn't be repaired. It freezes
usually when I run programs that require a lot of memory
and sometimes when nothing is running at all and the
longest its gone without freezing is about an hour. My
system specs are win xp home, athlon 1.3 ghz, 256 mb ddr
ram, a seagate harddrive that was almost full when the
crashing started but I removed enough that defrag runs.

I've defragged twice, used the winxp cd to try and repair
windows, ran norton disk doctor to remove errors, can't
run Sisoft's sandra diagnostic tool b/c it freezes.

Does anyone know how I can figure out what the problem is,
whether its a hardware or software issue, or am I just
going to have to reformat my harddrive?

I think you've already answered your question. Basically, something got
really too damaged, either by the trojan(s) or your repairs. Format the
drive, install Windows clean, reinstall programs from cd's (and be sure
you have a current av program in there), restore data from backups.

Malke