Hey guys,

I'm trying to clean up a bit of my old dell demension 8300

during the process of trying to make the computer faster and more smooth for my dad to run as a media centre, I increased the pagefile to 1.5 Gb rather than to buy RAM.

Restart LEAD to an error preventing me from booting, undeterred, I decided to try it again but this time it did not work, and using a windows xp DISC from a friend to repair install has failed to work. Either files could not be found (but were there!) or asking for product key which my dell's does not work for it.

Even if I cancel the prompt for key, it restarts and I get a flash of a blue screen and it reboots.

The option to disable automatic reboot is no longer there. Any help would be appreciated.

PS I was wondering if I could boot an OS from CD like Ubuntu would allow me to salvage files?1) Virtual memory is not a replacement for ram and increasing its size will rarely if ever have any EFFECT on performance. Leaving it as "system managed" is almost always best.
2) Increasing the size of a pagefile CANNOT cause a system to malfunction. Something else happened.
3) If you borrow a disc to do a repair install it must be the same version as you have installed (Home/Pro and the same service pack level). Assuming it is, the repair install will work.Cheers, it was originally service pack 1, but the CD was service pack 3, but my old dell had been updated to service pack 3, so I need to find an old one?It needs to be the same as whatever is currently installed. If it's sp3 then it should be sp3.Was the Windows XP disk you used for a Dell or another computer? Some manufacturers make their disk for their systems only for them to work properly.

If the restore feature was enabled try accessing through SAFE mode to a previous DATE when the system was working before the changes.
Inside the Dell PC Restore Partition