Will not boot. Varied success.

Hi. This is my first post and I am an advanced beginner. I hope my post conforms to the rules. Please let me know if I have posted incorrectly or if I should provide more information. Thank you for reading.

Here's the situation:
My very faithful and sturdy 2.5 year old Dell Inspiron 600m is running XP and is having issues. This computer is used heavily but has been almost flawless. Now it won't run.

On start up, I get one of the following scenarios (can't tell which one I will get):
1) a blue screen
Technical info:

STOP: 0x0000008E (0xC0000005, 0xBF801FA9, 0xF258EC48, 0x00000000)

**** win32k.sys - Address BF801FA9 base at BF800000, Datestamp 43446a58

2) will not power up - so i have to remove the battery, unplug the computer and then plug it in again before it will start to boot.
3) boots and I can load a program (such as Outlook or notepad). However, once I start typing or using the mouse, it locks up and won't even allow me to access task manager. At this point, I force a shutdown.
4) I tried safe mode and it froze up while I was navigating safe mode.

In the last 48 hours, the following changes/events have occured:

1) 2 days ago - I loaded XChat2 and configured it for an 8 person IRC channel.

2) Configured my Outlook to access a new IMAP account.

3) Received 4 emails via this new IMAP account which were quarantined by AVG Free Edition (Virus checker) because of suspicions of MyDoom.

4) Got a low disk space warning (I knew I was getting close and was downloading a large file). When asked if I wanted to check for unused files to remove (I think that's what the dialogue box said), I accidentally clicked yes but once the scanning commenced, I cancelled the process. I manually solved the issue by deleting a couple large files. For the last couple months, I have been running with about 1.5GB free space out of 40GB.

Any thoughts on what to do?

Thanks,
Bill

 

Hi
I wanted to follow up and report what I found. I did all the things you suggested and it did not solve the problem. So I decided to be bold and moved the hard drive to another Dell to see if the problems would persist. They did not. So that eliminated software (in my mind). So then I swapped the DIMMs for others and still had the issue. After much experimentation... i discovered one of the metal points on the female end of DIMM A (I am sure this has a name) had broken off. I could only see this with a flashlight. As long as I pull the DIMM out of side A, the machine runs fine (albeit a little slow on only 256MB of RAM)

So now I just need to buy a 512MB stick to go in slot B and I'll be back in action.

This fix was definitely waaaaay beyond my skillset. But all seems good so far.

Thanks.