It's a long story. First my desktop was just hit a virus and I'm not quite inept enough that I can't usually fix that by myself, but this one BSOD'd immediately on startup and I had to leave TO in a couple of days so I took it in to a shop nearby. For whatever reason, the dude just did a full HD wipe (backed up my files though) and, as a freebie, upgraded my OS to a (cracked) Windows 7. The new OS smell was nice and all, but the rear sound jack didn't work (multimedia audio controller driver), so I took it back in. That seemed fixed at the store, but when I got back it broke again. As I had to leave the following day I just decided to take the hit and buy a USB headset as I'd found out that worked.
Anyway, my mother was helping me move back to school this year, so I was able to transport the rig in her car. When I set it up in my room, however, I found out that the display driver would crash after playing games for a small amount of time (dependent; Space Marine demo crashed after about a minute, while Sins of a Solar Empire could last for ten or so). Because of the problems I'd had getting it fixed back in TO, I hadn't the time to try out any games, so I had no idea if the problem was because of the guy's incompetence or my own; it could have been damaged on the drive or it could have been related to Windows Update. So I tried all I know: I did a system restore, rolled back drivers, opened the case and cleaned the card and uninstalled previous updates. Nothing. So finally I decided to reinstall Windows XP, because how hard could it be. Well, it turns out the installation was easy enough but the thing just boots up with an "Error loading OS" screen. I've reinstalled twice so far. I think the problem might be related to the fact that I couldn't install onto "C:" partition (only 100MB listed) and installed on "D:" instead. Basically I'd rather find out what I'm doing wrong before I have to shell out even more money.
Specs:
2.22 Ghz AMD Athlon
Geforce 9600 GT
2 GB RAM
tl;dr I am absolutely terrible, please help
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The PC repair guy didn't do any troubleshooting and is very likely to be incompetent. This sounds much more like a hardware issue than a virus.
even so, you might want to try reformatting to allow you to install on the C Drive; if it works it will likely rule out hard drive failure. run memtest on your ram to rule out memory failure (well, the vast majority of ram failures can be diagnosed with memtest atleast) The display crashes sound an awful lot like an overheating issue to me; games like space marine will have the card running at top capacity significantly faster than games like Sins.