XP Freeze Up or Lock UP!!!!

[uvachief]

I am about to pull my hair out over this problem. About 3 months ago, I was having problems even loading certain webpages. If I went to www.oldnavy.com or any similar type site, the page would try to load and then just automatically shut down with an error message about paging file being too low. I gave up trying to remedy it so I reinstalled Windows XP from scractch. I was unable to figure out how to blank the dang harddrive though. It was easy with W98. You just went to dos and did fdisk.

After re-installing WXP, I am now having lock up problems. I will be running a program sometimes for all of 5 minutes and total freeze up. Othertimes I can be up and running for hours. I have no clue what is causing this. It was not freezing up prior to the re-install. The web pages load fine now (well unless Java is in it - then it won't and I have to run freaking netscape!).

Got any suggestions? Are there any diagnostic programs I can run to check to see if hardware is failing?

Here are my configurations - little old
FIC motherboard (i don't have the model handy but can add later) - sound built in
Athlon 1.2 MHz processor
384 MB PC-133 memory (128+256)
1 HG with 40 GB
1 HG with 20 GB
Radeon 7200 Video Graphics Accelerator 64MB
Windows XP

I built this thing from scratch about 2 years ago. Its been great until the last 6 months.

Someone suggested that the memory chips may be bad.

I cannot even find a website for my motherboard which makes me believe it is a piece of crap and the manufacturer went out of business.

Anyone got a good source for cheap, dependable MB RAM chips? Looking for PC-133 256MB chips.

Please email me with any thoughts or suggestions at uvachief@excite.com.

[doctorgonzo]

You are right about one thing: that mobo is a POS. So it could be causing the problems. The memory or PSU could also be culprits.

When you reinstalled XP, did you do a repair or a fresh install?

You can download DocMemory to test the RAM.