First Build Randomly Freezing

[GreatHeroRift]

Okay. The problem: my computer has been freezing up fairly randomly since I built it a couple of days ago. It's my first build and, aside from this problem, everything seems to be working fairly well. I've been trying to solve the problem myself by looking up similar cases online, but so far, I haven't had much luck.

So far, all I know is that the problem appears to be networking related, as the freezes mostly occur while a wireless network card or wireless USB network adapter is plugged in, usually while Internet Explorer is open. Originally, I thought that this was a problem with my network card itself (a Belkin N1 Desktop Card), so I removed it. The freezes stopped altogether, so I had it returned and purchased a USB dongle (a D-Link RangeBooster G) instead. Though everything seemed fine at first, the freezes quickly returned with a vengeance.

However, the problem did at least slightly change with the new card. Prior to removing the Belkin, some of the freezes (though only very rarely) would eventually, after a couple of minutes, bring up a blue screen with a MACHINE_CHECK_ERROR. Since the removal of the Belkin N1 card, the freezes just remain as freezes--no reboot, no blue screen, no nothing.

One of my friends suggested that it might be an issue with the processor overheating, so I installed a program that was on the ASUS motherboard's CD, which allowed me to monitor the temperature of the motherboard and the processor at all times. The temperatures NEVER went above 40C. In fact, at the time of each lockup, both temps are typically between 34C and 37C.

To further add to my confusion, I'm able to perfectly run Bethesda's Oblivion on very high settings with only one lock-up which occurred while I had mIRC and an IE window open at the same time.

The freezes themselves are slightly unpredictable. Sometimes they have occurred while watching a YouTube video or while watching a streaming video on Windows Media Player, causing the sound to get stuck and loop infinitely a short clip while the screen remains frozen. (A similar annoying sound-looping occurred during the single Oblivion freeze.) The second most frequent freezing occurs simply while a page is loading, though I can't find any sort of pattern to exactly what about the page is causing it to hard lock--upon restarting, I'm usually able to go to the page fine.

Also, whenever the computer freezes and I have to reboot, the computer will no longer detect the wireless adapter or network card. In the case of the Belkin N1 card, I had to shut down, remove it, power on, uninstall and reinstall the drivers, power off, reinsert, and turn it back on before it would work properly again. With the USB adapter, I have to unplug the dongle and plug it back in once Windows has started, though if I unplug/replug during the reboot, before Windows is loaded, everything appears to be fine.

I'm not sure if this helps, but during the startup, on one of the black screens, there is a list of PCI devices or whatever and the IRQs they occupy. I noticed that four or five devices (one of them being the Network Controller) are all sharing IRQ 11. I was going to attempt reassigning them to different IRQs, but nothing on IRQ 11 seems to be appearing in the Device Manager.

This has gradually been becoming more and more annoying. Though I'm able to do a lot of things on the computer despite the random freezes, I don't enjoy having to constantly reboot and unplug/replug things just to surf the internet. Thanks in advance.

Parts:
Cooler Master Centurion 5 Case
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium Motherboard
eVGA Geforce 7600GS Video Card
Antec SmartPower 2.0 SP-400 ATX12V 400W Power Supply
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor
CORSAIR XMS 2GB (2 x 1GB) DDR SDRAM
Creative Inspire P7800 90 Watts 7.1 Speaker
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
Acer AL1916W Black 19" 8ms Widescreen LCD Monitor
LITE-ON 16X DVD±R DVD Burner Black ATAPI/E-IDE
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic 7.1 Channels PCI Interface Sound Card
BELKIN F5D8001 PCI N1 Wireless Desktop Card (Now removed.)
D-Link Rangebooster G USB 2.0 Adapter (Replacement for the Belkin card.)

[glc]

If you are using wireless, have you disabled all onboard wired network adapters in the bios? Have you disabled the onboard sound in the bios, being that you are using a sound card?

[GreatHeroRift]

I just tried your advice and disabled a a couple of options in the bios. It seemed like everything was working fine after that, but they eventually kicked in again (after about an hour or so, I think), this time while loading up a ytmnd.com page, though I was able to view a great deal of youtube.com videos without any trouble at all before that, which had initially led me to believe everything was fine.

[glc]

Well, any time you network with USB, there's gonna be heavy CPU utilization - you will never get true stability. That's just the nature of USB. Your Belkin card may just be defective.

I'd get a PCI card that matches your router - both brand and type - for best results. I've always had decent luck with Linksys wireless cards.

IRQ conflicts are a thing of the past with WinXP and ACPI/APIC. The only things you may want to do is change your bios setting for PnP OS Installed from Yes to No (or vice versa) and move the PCI cards around to different slots.