tm 4402wlmi - many errors, no ideas

I got this notebook last week. It worked fine out of the box. As suggested here and other places, I converted to ntfs first. I used partition magic. The hardware seems to work fine, and I don't recall any errors during the process. I also added another 512 megs of ram. (crucial valueselect pc2700 something like that)

I get random crashes. The notebook only works well on about 1 of 3 boots. Sometimes, I get a momentary blue screen with text, and it immediately reboots before I can determine what it says. When it goes to error reporting, the MS website tells me it's a driver problem.

Firefox is messed up. It doesn't save settings or bookmarks, and I can't use the search bar. (Issue resolved; I went into documents and settings/user/application data/firefox and deleted the settings folder. When I restarted firefox, it reimported settings from IE and now it works like a charm.)

Once, lsass.exe was using ~75% of my cpu, not sure why, and it only stopped on a reboot.

I had problems with cli.exe, and I upgraded to .NET 1.1. That got rid of some of it, but on this very reboot, I still had trouble with it.

When I run a virus scan, it comes up negative. Scanning the hard disk for errors is also negative. I think there are some issues going on with all the pre-installed drivers and hardware with windows, and I think something might be messed up in the OS or hard drive. I have no idea what. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Yeah, that's one thing to try. Haven't got around to it yet. Could faulty memory be causing the problems?

The screws are really small, and I don't have a screwdriver up here at school that's that small. Might have to run to walmart and pick up one. I should probably own one anyway. Any thoughts on the other issues?

I used partition magic 8.0.

I removed the extra stick of ram, just to see how it goes. No blue screen crashes so far. (Update: Removing the RAM seems to have corrected some of the issues. Does this mean I had a bad stick? It boots fine every time now, no blue screens.)

I also booted to safe mode and ran disk check. It went through all three modes, and then said I had errors, but that it was in read-only mode and couldn't repair them. I also partially defragged the hard drive. I downloaded some updated drivers for some of the hardware, but I haven't had time to mess with them yet, and I don't want to try too many things at once.

It's also started givng me the following error message on every bootup. It seems to be harmless: "(Registry Recovery) One of the files containing the system's Registry data had to be recovered by use of a log or alternate copy. The recovery was successful." Any idea how to resolve this? I'm thinking a complete defrag might make it go away.

I am concerned that some things got fouled up when I converted to NTFS. Is that even possible?

Again, it's not catastrophically broken, just seems like a few moderate issues that are fixable.

I found more than one version of memtest. Presently, I don't have time to do heavy-duty troubleshooting (dead day today, finals soon). Can these programs fix my ram if it is indeed broken?

I have to disagree there. You're certainly in the minority of owners with that opinion. Mine runs fine (without the probably bad memory), and runs every 3d game I've thrown at it without a hitch. It's solidly built, and portable enough for my needs. I still have to recommend it to others in spite of the problems I've had.