VERY IMPORTANT!! COMPUTER PROBLEM!!?

[R.S.B]

Hi I am a student currently in my Junior year of high school and i mainly use my computer for regular teenager stuff like facebook and twitter, but i also use it for school...typing papers, doing research, etc and recently my computer has been messing up very badly and any help would be very appreciated!

Okay so i have a Gateway Sx2800-07 that is running a Intel Core 2 Quad proccesor Q8300 with a Intel GMA X4500 integrated video card, with 4gb of ram and 640 gb of memory on the harddrive

http://www.amazon.com/Gateway-SX2800-07-...roduct_top

but anyways the computer works fine for like 10-15 minutes, but then things will stop loading and the start menu will stop working and i cant click on anything or do anything....also it will shut down forever! these problems have been happening every single day now all the time, please help me! My finals are here and i need to do major research projects for my classes and all the help provided would be very much appreciated

Thank You

[Fenji]

I had that too!!! Anyway my solution was to complete wipe everything. You should be able to do this in the boot menu (Start up pc, hit F1 real fast). But remember to backup your documents on a usb

[isashach]

Ah Windows.... you really should have gotten a Mac if you're in school or in college!
The thing is, Windows has a tendency to screw itself up, requiring a fresh re-installation every couple of months, or at most, years. You may have done absolutely nothing harmful, but it just clogs up with useless things which significantly slow it down and cause it to malfunction like yours does.

Re-installing Windows is super easy, and it genuinely shocks me how many people throw their computer away because they think that it's genuinely broken - virtually all 'slow' computers can be fixed (and yours is by no means slow) with a re-install. All you have to do is backup all your important data to an external hard drive, and set up a USB install stick. It all takes no more than an hour, and there are hundreds, if not thousands of very clear guides about how to do it online.