System Crash

[Rick]

I was wondering if anyone could help...

Running Windows XP home edition on an AMD Athalon XP
procesor with ASUS A7N8X Motherboard and 512 Mb of RAM, I
get an error about every two weeks on startup:

"Windows could not start because the following file is
missing or corrupt
\windows\system32\config\system "

I have resored the registry hives and all is well, but
this happens on a regular basis.

More recently, I came across the error on startup that
the NTOSKRNL.EXE file was corrupted, but was able to
recover using the extract utility and the installation
disk.

The hard drive diagnostics are fine (Western Digital
WD800BB). Can anyone help explain why this is crashing
so often, and what I can do to prevent this from
happening in the future?

Many thanks in advance,

 

[Ryan Nelson]

Generally if the error is occurring randomly it is most likely a hardware
failure possibly related to ram, power supply, motherboard, or processor.
Take a look at the following microsoft help article

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314477&Product=winxp

What is the last thing you are doing prior to the problem happening? Have
you made any hardware change recently?

Here are a couple ways to test the memory: start > run > msconfig >
boot.ini tab > click advanced > click maxmem, and specify a lower amount of
ram for windows to use, this will tell you if part of your ram is
incorrectly configured or mismatched chips.
Or you can download a memory diagnostic utility free of charge at
http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp .

Good luck.