Please Help

[Sub_Zero]

I got this message from a friend Please help

I have a Gateway laptop, with a Celeron processor, 2.2 GHz, 504 megabites of RAM, and a 40 Gig hard drive. It is only 16 months old, but it has totally melted down 4 times with-in the last 5 weeks. (Just about the time frame that I got my new digital camera (an Olympus C 8080). I have had to have my nephew, the computer guru, fix it each time. The computer has totally crashed, and he has had to reformat the whole thing each time, reinstalling windows xp operating system, etc. Last week I was in the chat room here, getting information from mrrick, and it just went black. Total meltdown.

Here are my questions: My computer is on life support at this time, and I know it will not last much longer. Does any one out there have any recommendations for laptops? I use photoshop, but am also willing to switch to something else, if I have to. Is there some reason that my new digital camera is wrecking havoc with my laptop? Do I need a pentium processor, more RAM, etc???

I am even condidering going to an imac, but do not have any knowledge about them. (just wanting to get away from windows)...

Any information that anyone has to share would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks so much!

[Mr B]

I can't help but wonder if the HDD is going bad, and not the whole laptop itself (IE, the motherboard)...

Is there any way he can get ahold of a spare laptop hard drive long enough to install his OS and test it and see?

[Sub_Zero]

I will foward this to her thanks I hope it will help
if anyone else has any ideas please reply.

Thanks Mr B

[Slackfumasta]

Dude, buy a Dell!

There's lots of information in this forum about different kinds of laptops. Pretty much the most popular are Dells, Sagers, and well that's about it. A few IBMs and Compaqs sprinkled in here and there.

[Sub_Zero]

I would have goten a Dell if it was me I am not sure if my friend can just go out and spend that kind of money.

[__Game_Start__]

OK, why is there 502 mb of ram.. ? why are you using a gateway, and why are you using a celeron... So many questions... if hes able to format and fix temporarilly i doubt its the hard drive.

[Flamed_Chip]

I think the 502mb ram will be because some is being used for an IGP.

This happened to one of my housemates laptops about 2 weeks ago. For a number of weeks I was having to reformat it for her about once or twice a week because after a while it would always hang on booting windows. Booting in safe mode showed it was hanging on an ATI driver. After sending it off for repair it turns out there was actually a fault with the integrated graphics and after a motherboard replacement all is well again.

[Slackfumasta]

Says he has 504 MB of RAM, which means he probably has a video adapter that is using 8 MB of system RAM for it's video memory.