unstable comp, any sugestions?

[enrico1515]

2 years ago, i built my comp. it is an athlon xp 3200+ on a foxconn 600 series motherboard with 1 gb of ram (one pure talent, the other kingston), in a very cheasy case with a saphire radeon 9250 128mb graphics card.

I tried to go as cheap as possible for a worthy gaming machine, also it was my first build and i was on a 400$ budgeti made one mistake building it, i forgot the motherboard spacers, but after i put them in and it was perfectly stable for about the first year of use, then the problems started.

first to die was my hardrive, which i bought oem, the people i sent it to to troubleshoot mis diagnosed it as a blown graphics card, then after i looked at it myself i relized the problem was the hard drive

after replacing the harddrive it has run fine untill now, about another year later. the system is stable for about the first 2 hours of use, when it abruptly freezes screen. if you try and start it after the freeze, it will start then freeze again, after about 3 minutes. i must let it wait and cool for about an hour, when it will start and go for about 2 more.

does anyone have any sugestions of what the soloution might be? i am waiting to spend the money on a diagnostic because i am on a very small budget

[enrico1515]

oh, forgot to add, i think the problem is probably cooling;i set the bios temperature on 120 degrees, and it hit that right after startup

[mjc]

Clean and reseat the CPU heatsink...for starters. Also make sure any and all case fans are operational.

You could also be having power supply problems, probably heat related...give it a few shots of compressed air (hold the fan blade still and do it outside).

[alex666]

What MJC said. Also, you might want to check and see if any of your capacitors are swollen, have any brown powder on them, cracked. That mobo is of the era that produced bad capacitors and it could be reaching the age where the caps are going bad.

The only other thing I can think of is to check your memory using memtest86. It doesn't sound like a memory problem, but it never hurts to check.

Good luck.

marty

[Sylvander]

Make a Knoppix Linux Live CD (http://www.knoppix.org/) on a known good PC, then boot from it on this suspect PC.

If KNoppix runs just fine, then you know there is nothing wrong with your hardware [HDD excluded] or BIOS, but is probably due to the Windows software environment [or HDD].
If the problem is still there with knoppix then it isn't a problem with the OS software [Windows or Knoppix], but something other than those. [hardware (not HDD) or BIOS]

If you have any trouble booting from a bootable CD, make and use this...
[You need a FDD set 1st in the BIOS Setup's boot menu]
How to make a free “Smart Boot Manager” floppy
http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=41498
This makes it easier to boot a chosen drive, particularly an optical drive with a bootable disk in it.