[bpelland]

I am trying to reformat and reinstall windows xp on an old computer.It boots from the cd and gets as far as: to set up windows xp now, press enter. At this point the computer freezes and wont do anything. I am trying to reformat and reinstall because I thing the computer has a bug or a virus. Is there anything I can do at this point?

 

[Old Rich]

Did you disconnect all external peripherals except the monitor, keyboard and mouse, and be sure those are not USB, or wireless. Any internal USB card should also be removed.

 

[bpelland]

All of these things have been done.

 

[Old Rich]

What brand/model is the pc? . . how much RAM? Did it have XP installed on it before?

 

[bpelland]

It's a hp pavilion with windows xp installed on it. It has 248 mb of ram.

 

[Old Rich]

Well . . that's not much RAM for XP, but that should not stop the install.

I'd download memory and drive diagnostics to rule out hardware failure.

HP should have diagnostics on their website, or you can get memtest from the link in my signature and drive diagnostics from the drive manufacturer

Samsung http://www.samsungelectronics.com/hdd/support/utilities/utilities_index.html
Seagate http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/index.html
Maxtor/Quantum http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/products/index.htm
Western Digital http://support.wdc.com/download/
IBM/Hitachi http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm#DFT
fujitsu/Seimens http://www.fcpa.fujitsu.com/download/hard-drives/#diagnostic
IBM/Hitachi http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm#DFT