[slodave]

A lot of good advice, but I strongly recommend checking the hard drive to see if it's bad before formatting, reinstalling... Doing this day in ad day out, there was a time that I routinely skipped this and found myself finding out an hour later, after fighting with formats, installs, that the HD was bad... In certain failures, a HD will continue to run, not causing Windows to crash, but start up may take forever, the pc runs extremely slow...

Granted with a pc that is from 2000, it's best to to just toss it and get current...