peterh

Your gfx card is incapable of playing Doom 3, Doom 3 requires a DX 9 'capable' card. The Intel 845G is a DX 8 card and will NOT run Doom 3 - its like asking a Reliant robin to compete in a F1 race (not going to happen). Please get a AGP card to play games on ....

You need to turn off the onboard graphics in the BIOS (not in Windows) by setting it to Disabled/Off/0MB or whatever.

Sounds definately like some spyware (or a virus) has got onto it and turned it into a 'Zombie' PC by hackers. Run MSCONFIG and see what Startup items are loaded and then check them out with a Ant-spyware site eg. http://www.spywareguide.com/product_list_full.php Stop the bad processes via Task Manager and use an Antispyware program to remove them.

Sounds like has corrupted some essential Windows files and now refuses to boot, if possible you could boot off a Windows disc and run a Repair to repair/replace the files. If thats not possible, boot off a Knoppix CD, copy all the data on to a CDRW/DVD-R/RW disc. Then reboot off your Restore disc or Windows disc and reinstall windows.

What hardware specs do you have? HL2 requires good fast hardware to play, a laptop may not be upto the job to play it smoothly...

There is a hardware requirement for WM PCs, in particular the ability to tune to TV using a TV tune, use CD/DVD burners etc which may be unsuitable for certain types of PC: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter/evaluation/faq.mspx

Are you moving to a 2003 domain or keeping the existing NT4 domain? For NT4 it is not possible to convert a PDC or BDC to a member server. You have to reinstall windows.

Just remember that HL2 comes on a DVD, not a CD, so you will need a DVD-ROM drive to read it!

Get hold of a copy of Knoppix CD, so that you can boot from it and copy and data off the Hard disk. Then you can safely reformat the hard disk and reinstall W2K. See other replies about repairing boot files (you really need a W2K disk to properly repair Windows).

Are you using local or roaming profiles? If roaming profiles then you cannot share it with other PCs with different PCs w/o corrupting it. As for Vista, since its beta, I would expect bugs to appear, the only fix, is to wait for next release.

It is possible to authenticate to AD with unix systems but you will not get all the features of AD using non-Windows systems. See http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Authenticating-Linux-Active-Directory.html

What gfx card/chipset do you have? What speed CPU do you have? Try dxdiag.exe or msinfo32.exe

I think ZoneAlarm Pro does not have this problem just the free one. I am thinking of taking off ZA anyway as it takes too long to load up.

Its most likely a problem in background using all cpu. I have same problem mostly due to either my Antivirus, Spamkiller or Zone alarm taking ages to load up and process whatever info.

Have you considered this to be a graphics problem rather than a System Restore problem. Update your graphics card drivers, could be a bug in rendering the calendar properly.

Ask the IT people to restore the files from tape as its on the server. They should have a backup procedure in case of user error like this.

You can only fit the Athlon XP processor range into Socket A type motherboards (which is what I have). You might be able to go as far as Athlon XP 3200+. The replacement is the Athlon64 but that means a new motherboard.... As for graphics cards, go as high as you can, you can get the Nvidea GeForce 6800LE for about £101.01 from Dabs.

What sound chipset are you using? (See Dxdiag or Device Manager) Do you have 'Legacy Audio Drivers' installed? If it uses SoundBlaster emulation, you can enable it in the Autoexec.nt file by adding the SET BLASTER lines as described in the file.

Are all the computers in the same Workgroup? (See System control panel). Do you have the same user name and password on the all the computers? (See COmputer Management)? IF not, is the Guest account enabled?

How did you uninstall the drivers? Via Device Manager, Add/Remove Programs or manually? The correct way is via ADd/Remove Programs and uninstall 'ATI Display Drivers' from the program list.

Please note that System Restore is nothing to do with documents, its more to do with restoring Drivers, OS Files and programs. To restore documents, you restore from a backup using NTBackup or other 3rd party programs. Really, you should do regular backups of your documents to prevent things like this happening!

Try McAfee ePolicy Orchestra to manage antivirus and Antispyware software and updates to clients: http://www.mcafee.com/us/products/mcafee/mgmt_solutions/epo.htm

Load Services.msc and check that Cryptographics Services is set to Automatic and is started.

Load Service.msc and look for 'Cryptographics Services', make sure it is set to Automatic and is started.

Has anyone tried configuring C:\Windows\System32\Config.nt and changing the EMM= line to allocated Expanded Memory?