I was about to type in the document name to save a Word document and checked the computer clock calendar, which made the whole computer freeze for ages for some reason.
I took the freeze as a crash, so I held down the power button to turn off, and then restarted to find a black screen!
I held down the power button to turn off again, and then restarted to find the computer booted as normal, but then froze at the loading windows screen.
I went in to safe mode to do some research, and every time I tried to restart the computer, it closed windows, but then hung at a black screen. When I powered off holding down the power button, and then restarted the computer, I was met with a black screen (just like after the crash). I powered off and restarted again which made the computer boot as normal.
I checked the hard drive in the restore console, and found it was fine.
I couldn't find any good solutions online so I decided to format the hard drive and reinstall windows. This helped but the computer froze after the desktop loaded, maybe around 1min afterwards, forcing me to manually power off like all the times before, and go through the whole power on, black screen, then power off, then power on again to boot up.
So; Safe mode seems to be working OK (which I'm using at this moment). I've tried clean booting in to normal Windows XP, but none of that has stopped the computer freezing after desktop loads. It seems there is some problem that Safe mode doesn't encounter but normal mode does, even with the most minimal diagnostic setup in normal mode. What this issue is I do not know. Can anyone help?
I am suspecting that the restart problem and the desktop freezing are linked, since the two began happening together.
Any ideas?