Sounds like you may have a memory problem. Try swaping in known good memory or if you have more than one DIMM installed, try each one individually. Other problems could be a balky hard drive or a CMOS issue. If you can access the CMOS you may find a diagnostic option. Running the IBM diagnostics may help pinpoint the problem. Otherwise download and try to run memtest86 (Google for it). This will help identify if the laptop memory is at fault. Finally, try to identify if you changed any system compenents, installed any new sortware, or made any updates immediately before the problem started.