PC Problems

The year started off with my Home PC was having problems...My daughter used the PC for gaming while I normally use it for surfing,,,answering my email...downloading FLVs ...blogging...commenting or reading on Churlish Figure...or Praying for the Depraved Soul of Margaret...or killer rants...cover your mouth...of course EEK...my XP OS was really dying and I have not yet had the time to diagnose what's wrong....the PC's having a hard time to boot...the error message was "Missing or corrupt HAL.DLL or windows could not start ...blah...blah...until it gave up on me...so i spent a whole day fixing the PC...I besically re-installed a new OS and was quite happy that I didn't have to format the hard disk so that I could retrieve more of my work and files from the PC...xp is one of the most stable OS out there but it does take a whole lot of time to bogged it down until to the point you could not boot anymore...but that happened to me...so its not that stable as I am suppose to think of...and with all the updates of the OS has been done...the OS was not as pristine as the original files with SP1 and SP2...so maybe these updates were also part of the problem...but at lease I was able to resolve the problem with a new operating system...this I did all by myself while wifey was telling me to get a technician to fix the PC but I was able to get it done by myself...