[godofnoob]

Hey I'm new to this community and I am also new to the techie world. I don't really know all the fancy names and such and such that everything has, but my computer has a few problems which I think could be related. Its kind of long because I don't know what's important and what is not, so sorry to those of you who will try to help me.

I play a game called Warcraft3 the frozen thone, which I'm sure you have heard of.
Up until about last night I was able to play my game without too much hassle. However, when I tried to open my game, an error popped up that said

"Frozen Trhone was unable to locarte your CD-ROM drive.
Please make sure your Frozen Throne disc is in your CD-ROM drive, then click on 'retry'.

The buttons it gave me were "Retry" and "Cancel"
i checked my disc and it was in, so I clicked retry but it didn't work. I thought w/e ill restart my computer. However, this is when I became concerned.

(im not sure if this next part is of consequence to the disc problem but it is a problem I would like to fix.)

It took a long time to reboot my computer. I run windows XP home edition and on the screen where it says "Windows is loading" or something, with a black background and that techie little loading bar going, my computer seemed to freeze. I let it sit like that, and thne instead of continuing to the log-in screen as normal, it turned to a blank screen. I noticed that the little red light that I believe means my computer is thinking or loading was blinking every feww secdonds for around half a second. However, after say 10 secons, it discontinued blinking altogether. I sat like that a long time and decided that my computer really had frozen and restarted it again. It took a while, so I went and watched some tv and when I came back it was at the log-in screen. I logged in and naturally I thought I had a virus. I scanned it using the aol security thing, which did not produce results. WHile it was scanning, I tried to open my computer. When I did, the icons were there quite briefly and then dissappeared. i waited for them to come back, which they did not. I tried to close my mycomputer thing which didnt work, so i ended up terminating it with the crt alt delete thingy end task blah blah balh. I then tried to open it again which probably wasnt wise. It didnt work. Once my scan was complete I restarted my computer again just because everything was going so slow and I couldnt even open my computer. However I find it interesting to note that AIM, AOL and Mozilla FireFox were functional at this time.

Now it gets mayb more complicated. My computer has two operating systems or something, Im not sure what you would call it. When I restart my computer, it asks me if I want to use Windows XP home edition or Windows XP home edition. Yes they are the same thing. They have the same files on each one, but they appear to have different settings on them. For instance, idfferent desk top backgrounds etc etc im not sure how deep it goes. This time I tried using the second windows xp home edition. This is the one I use mostly. my computer did not work once again. and more importantly, neither did my warcraft.

After a few times of turning it off and on and leaving it off overnight to cool down, I finally got "my computer" to show me some icons. (this is on the second operating system) I tried scanning for viruses with McAfee , thought I discontinued after about five minutes and no results.

(Now is the real problem i am having that is really racking my brain)

"my computer" did not display the CD-ROM icon at all. I know that normally it would show an icon for it, i forget what its called, and when a disk is in, it will display that disc. However, neither one is being displayed. I have 2 CD-Roms on my computer, but i am not sure what hte difference is. The top one seems to operate with Roxio Disc Recorder whats it, but if has refused to open since about forever, with roxio saying "no recorder" there is no hole that I can see for a paper clip to manually open which my friend suggested to me. So the bottom CD-ROM just doesnt seem to be working with my computer. when i insert the disc, there is a whispering noise as if air was blowing. I take this to mean my disc is spinning. the green light is also flashing that is right under the cd-rom thingy (lol) however, in my experience of playing warcraft for many years I see that light usually changes and my curser changes to a spinning disk, and then my game pops up asking if I want to play, uninstall, options, intro, etc etc. However, I am unable to make that screen appear. I tried using other cds with the same error: absolutely nothing happening.

So, my problems are that my Cd-Rom wont open, my other CD-rom isnt being read by "my computer" and won't play my discs, and my computer takes a long time to restart.

Please not that this computer was assembled unprofessionaly by a friend who created it from parts ordered from the internet. It is also a family computer and I am the kid in the family.

I believe my problem is similar to this: https://www.askmehelpdesk.com/comput...s-_-23141.html

Please help me.
GodofNoob

[StuMegu]

Download this Microsoft windows memory diagnostic program. It will prompt you to make a bootable floppy disk. Reboot with this floppy in the drive and it will scan your computers memory for errors. (you may need to change the boot order in your computer bios)
http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

Do you have plenty of free disk space on your hard disk?

Do you have all important documents from this computer backed up?

I would suggest a format and re-install for this computer. I'm guessing that you don't really need two versions of XP home on your system. First thing to do though is get a good backup of all your documents and emails etc from your computer.

[ScottGem]

Did you upgrade this machine to Win XP or did it come with it?

How old is this machine? If it came with a CD/ROM drive (not a burner), its probably pretty old. It sounds like it may be a hardware problem with the CD/ROM drive, but those are inexpensive to replace. In fact you can replace it with a DVD burner for under $50.

[godofnoob]

Miraculously the cd-rom has read my disc and opened my program without any change that I have made, so maybe it was just a temporary problem of some sort? If I experience further problems such as a long restart I will post again on this thread. Thank you for your time and advice. Much appreciated.

Ethan