SillyDog701

[Fulvio]

I have my XP for nearly seven years. Obviously all sort of things can go wrong, but it chucks along as well as it can with its 512 MB RAM, and I have nearly 15 GB of hard drive. Good enough for my needs.
However, yesterday my computer shut itself down after about one hour of use, twice, showing a blue screen indicating a physical memory dump with some reference to win32K.sys.
I asked for advice, and was given all sort of suggestions, the most useful, that it hard to diagnose.
But, I am pretty sure that I had an e-reader, a Slick, hooked up via USB connections, both times. I did not connect it, today, and had no crash, after the computer has been on for five hours.
I checked the computer for drive errors, and cleaned up the Registry, using System Mechanic. The computer seems to work fine. Could some hardware connected via USB cause such havoc?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20111221 Firefox/9.0.1 SeaMonkey/2.6.1

[Antony]

Could some hardware connected via USB cause such havoc?

Back in the old days of Windows 98 and Windows 2000, this could.

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[PaulD]

Recommendation:
Do an archival save of everything on your C: disk, of files that are irreplaceable. And keep the archive current.

This summer we lost two systems due to hard-drive-related failures - one tower, the other a laptop. Both were older XP Pros. Both had a several-month trail of non-specific blue-screens. Full runs of diagnostics, both off-line and on-line, didn't isolate the problems. The problems were intermittent, but eventually fatal.

If your errors aren't hard drive, great. But at least your critical data are saved.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1

[Fulvio]

I back up my files on external drive, every other day.
As for my original problem, I have not seen it since I stopped using that pathetic e-reader.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:10.0.1) Gecko/20120208 Firefox/10.0.1 SeaMonkey/2.7.1