XP Home randomly freezes=Help!

[inquiring]

I use XP Home on an AMD Athlon 1700 with 1 GB PC 2100 RAM and a 16 mb GeForce vid card on an ABIT KG7 mobo. The system is scanned clean with Norton System Works, AD AWARE, SpyBot Search, Window Washer, etc. but WILL freeze or lock randomly when I am typing a word doc or sending email with Eudora thru my DSL acct. The only way out is to hard reboot. I don’t know what other diagnostics to perform and I want to stop the “freeze” problem. Any ideas about what I can try next? Thanks to you Pros.

PS-I’ve rolled back my NIVIDIA driver to two years ago-and the system still “freezes”.

 

[pscowboy]

If it is truly random, this may be a sign of a failing power supply or a stick of ram.

There are a few extremely knowledgeable techies in this forum who are the best experts about p/s's; one or two of them will offer help shortly.

As to the memory, get "MemTest" and run it for about 24 hours to rule out your ram as the problem (or find something).

 

[sturm]

Do a thorough cleaning of the inside of your system. All fans,grills, heat sink, memory, graphics card, power supply fans to rule out that problem. Second get a temperature monitoring program like motherboard monitor and check your temps.
if problem still exists run memtest like pscowboy suggested. if any errors are detectd try running one stick of ram at a time.
Last thing to do is a clean install of windows, but this is a last resort.
Try the obove, minus a clean install, and let us know what you find.