Computer Trouble

I thought i'd post here because i am out of ideas.

It started about 3 weeks ago, i had to format the computer because everything kept on crashing. So i done this and then it said "ntldr is missing" when i started up the computer, i couldn't find anyway of solving this so i took it to my local computer shop. He just formatted it again for me and it worked fine (though it cost me £30, )

Anyway, i started installing what i needed but after a couple of days the computer would crash more often. For example, i'd be talking on msn and listening to my music, the screen would just stay as it is and then the music would keep playing until the end of that song, also i'd be viewing a webpage and then multicoloured lines would appear and the screen would crash.

So i formatted again about 2 days ago, and that made the ntldr file missing again, so i got my dads friend round and he got xp back up and the computer, but it still crashes, is there anyway to stop this?

Thanks in advance.

My guess it it's a hardware problem - either a corrupted sector on your hard drive or some dodgy connections. Probably best to replace the hard drive or maybe the memory. Or the whole computer.

If you've formatted multiple times and the problem persists it's almost certainly some kind of hardware malfunction.

The two most likely suspects would be the hard drive, and the RAM. First of all, check your IDE cable is plugged securely into the motherboard and the hard drive. Secondly, you might try running some kind of check on the hard drive to test for bad sectors and the like.

In addition to this, you might want to try downloading and running memtest86 to test your RAM for problems.

We had allsorts of issues with my brothers PC (we'd install windows, it'd run fine for a while, then we'd get weird lines and blue screens, etc). He only had a single 512MB stick of RAM and memtest86 reported a whole load of errors, so we just replaced it with a new stick of Crucial RAM, and off she went. We've had no problems since.

I had the ntldr missing.

Its a file in your root directory. It's your hard drive where the problem lies.

I just bought a new one, solved. :P