Thanks for the advice. It has been back to the shop more than four times, we
have tried swopping screens, printers, keyboards, mouses, etc, cannot
pinpoint the fault which only occurs at home, event viewer never points to
anything specific. I have wondered if taking out the video card (NVIDIA
Geoforce 3500GT I think) might be something else to try, as it did the same
before the last "return" even though I had downloaded the absolutely uptodate
NVIDIA driver. This time I assume it's using the original driver.
I hadn't thought of the network card and drivers, will investigate that when
I get home. It also hangs/restarts when using a new removable hard drive
which works fine on our older computer and all others I've tried it on.
I managed to get home for 15 minutes over lunch and tried the "Home" CD on
sfc /scannow and it actually got as far as one third through the "verifying
all protected Windows files are intact and in their original versions"
....then it restarted!! (I had even disabled antivirus just in case it
interfered).
The computer shop insist there is nothing wrong with it but what use is it
if we can't use it for anything other than turning it on and off. There must
be corrupt files now, Internet Explorer 7 seems to be playing up, various
sites including Microsoft.com won't display correctly, or just appear in
Google, as if we had searched for them.
Sorry to ramble on, I am just so, so frustrated! I really appreciate your
help and assistance.