Major Problem with my homebuilt

[tdavis20050]

I recently just finished getting my computer built it has
-Pentium 4 540j processor
-mach speed socket 775 motherboard (listed as compatable with the processor)
-430 watt atx power supply
-my old computers hard drive
-a stick of 512 ddr-400 ram
-my old cd, floppy and dvd drive

I had windows 98 on my old computer, and it worked, but was really slow because of the old hardware I had. When I got all the new hardware installed, every tie I tried to run a program it would eventually give me the "has performed an illegal operation" and would close. I got windows xp for it, and now, after I run a program for a while it does the same thing. It crashes especially fast when I try do do something in My Computer. When I checked it out, it said that windows explorer was having some kind of error and having to be restarted. What could be the problem? any help or thoughts would be greatly apppreciated.

 

[Gavman42]

hard drive

 

[tdavis20050]

I tried reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling windows and it still does it. Then I ran a diagnostic on the hard drive and it checked out as bieng in excellent condition.

 

[Panzerzero]

When you just upgraded your hardware you didn't use regedit so the OS thinks you are missing hardware that should be there. This is common when doing a major upgrade but I don't think XP has that same issue. When you view the device drivers you'll see a look of question marks. Fix this and you should get the error any more or just upgrade the OS. 98 SE is missing a lotof stuff that XP Pro has. Good luck and the best way to learn is through errors.

 

[doolittle]

if you are familiar with the ultimate boot cd you should boot of it and give the memtest and Mersenne Prime a run for 8 hours or so for each. If either gives errors then it's HW related... if no errors and you can run knoppix and you can mount your hdd and scan it without errors then your HW is probably 100% and you just need the mobo drivers for windows.