Windows Protection Error?

[Ares1584]

A friend of mine's computer broke. It had an expired warranty so she bought new one and gave me the old to play with.

The computer is unable to boot, citing a protection error while initializing device VCACHE.

I tried using the Recovery Console off the Windows XP disk, but it says that
"File Setupdd.sys could not be loaded. The error code is 4."

Sometimes it says something when starting up about a 'memory size decrease'.

I've considered removing the hard disk, setting it as a slave, and putting it into a working computer, but I'm not really sure I want to do that, because I don't think it's worth messing up a working computer to fix one that I'm probably going to give away, anyhow.

Any idea what I can do to fix this?

[WhatsThisBoxFor?]

Heres one thing: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=330181

There was a similar error I looked at recently that invovled ram, maybe that could be a good starting point? Memtest: http://www.memtest86.com/

System specs? Any PCI cards?

[Markoman01027]

I searched the error message on Google.com and a few sites were saying that this could be a problem with RAM. Atleast the VCACHE message that you are receiving. Try 1 stick of RAM that you know that works.

[Ares1584]

Ah, that's a place to start.

Thank you.