XP locking up laptop

I loaded XP on my wifes laptop, IBM thinkpad A21e - Celeron 600 I think, 192 Meg of Ram, 20 gig hard drive.

It works fine for the mostpart but one time several months ago I couldn't get into my profile, I logged in as admin and deleted the account and recreated it, haven't had that problem since.

For a month or so now, rather than actually shutting down the thing we've just been putting it in hibernation mode. That's been working fine too until this morning. I just got a call from my wife telling me that the she tried to turn it on and it just has the "preparing to hibernate" screen up and it won't do anything else. She said that she can't even get it to turn off by pushing the power button.

Anyone else had any problems like this? Should I maybe assume that this laptop simply doesn't like XP and go back to Win 2000?

I'd appriciate any advice.

Thanks

 

I don't know a safe way to restore your system (at least without risking loosing your work from the last month), but take into account that the "hibernate" process is like a "pause button ", in terms of power consumption. It really doesn't shutdown windows.

... And you know what tend to happen to windows systems running continuously for over a month, installing, deleting, connecting to network, executing programs, switching users, doing many many things, and NEVER EVER SHUTING DOWN?

I do like you, but always reboot every weekend, or in case of software installations and the like...