Cursor freezes and Screen Goes Black

[Jeff]

My daughters computer was working fine until just recently. It will
intermitently freeze and then the screen goes black. The only "recovery"
from this is to reset the system. It was working fine (or appeared) to be
fine until she took it to University. She has downloaded MSN 7 since then.
That is the only program addition. Can this cause the problem? I restored
the system to a version prior to that date, however she has reloaded MSN
again (i.e. to stay in touch with friends). Unfortunately she hadn't used
the computer in the interim. The problem only seems to appear when she is
surfing the net. No error reports are generated.
OS is XP SP2

 

[Jeff]

My daughters computer was working fine until just recently. It will
intermitently freeze and then the screen goes black. The only "recovery"
from this is to reset the system. It was working fine (or appeared) to be
fine until she took it to University. She has downloaded MSN 7 since
then. That is the only program addition. Can this cause the problem? I
restored the system to a version prior to that date, however she has
reloaded MSN again (i.e. to stay in touch with friends). Unfortunately
she hadn't used the computer in the interim. The problem only seems to
appear when she is surfing the net. No error reports are generated.
OS is XP SP2

system is as follows
Gigabyte K8VM800M skt 754, A64,8*AGP, SATA
CPU AMD athlon64 3200
Corsair 512 DDR400 PC3200
video card. Gigabyte Radeon 9550SE 256 mb

 

[Malke]

system is as follows
Gigabyte K8VM800M skt 754, A64,8*AGP, SATA
CPU AMD athlon64 3200
Corsair 512 DDR400 PC3200
video card. Gigabyte Radeon 9550SE 256 mb

Not enough information to give specific diagnosis (could be hardware,
could be software), but because this is a computer belonging to a young
person who was away at college, the first troubleshooting steps are
determining the virus/malware status of the computer. Follow directions
here:

http://www.elephantboycomputers.com/page2.html#Removing_Malware

If the computer checks out completely clean, then it is time to move
onto hardware diagnosis. Testing hardware failures often involves
swapping out suspected parts with known-good parts. If you can't do the
testing yourself and/or are uncomfortable opening your computer, take
the machine to a professional computer repair shop (not your local
equivalent of BigStoreUSA).

Malke