My PC specs are in my profile but here's the basics. HP Pavilion a600n AMD Athlon XP 2800+ CPU.
We have one of those surge protector/power strips with the backup battery. So, yesterday, my cat somehow managed to press the power BUTTON (stupid design (no switch too easy to press)) on the surge protector so the two computers in our room were shut down hard (like a power outage). Both of them boot up fine, including the one i'm using right now, but the other loses responsiveness when you try to run a program on it. It varies how long it will stay stable, but eventually the running program will stop responding, then much of the time task manager can't shut down the program either by ending task or ending the process. When you try End Task, "dumprep.exe" appears in the processes list and uses all of the CPU capacity it can get (up to 100 percent if it can) and just sits there doing nothing, just heating up the processor. You can end this process and CPU usage goes down to around 3 to 4 percent. Well after more of this crap, you can't get task manager back up again. I just discovered that if you leave things in this condition (trying to end tasks and trying to start another program) the computer sometimes eventually (10 minutes or more) will complete what you told it to do. The programs commanded to shut down actually shut down, and any program you tried to start during this, starts running. But only sumtimes. But everything is still very slow and almost completely unresponsive. If you can even get the start menu up and start doing a proper shutdown, it only get to the windows is logging off screen and just freezes there. It never shuts off. You always have to do a hard shut down. I managed to do a system restore to the previous day before the system lost consciousness, but it didn't help at all. I suspect either a hardware problem or corrupted memory. I need this piece of junk to last until I build my new PC built so could you guys help me fix this?