i recently purchased an amd athlon xp second hand. my bios detects it correctly and detection software identifies it correctly, but i have to underclock it in the bios otherwise it crashes my pc bringing me to the dreaded blue screen. any suggestions? thanks

You have to supply more info than that. How about telling us the make/model of your board, what CPU you had before the 3200+, & the rest of your system specs?

mobo is an Abit NF7-S 2.0. old cpu was an athlon xp 1500+ (worked perfectly, although this was brand new) memory is - stick of 512mb corsair ddr ram (the one with the aluminium cover) and a stick of 512mb elixir ddr (the different brands of ram were working fine together with the previous cpu. gfx - 128mb geforce 6600gt agp. i can't think of anything else cheers

You say your RAM is DDR but you don't say what speed. It *should* be DDR400/PC3200. How are you setting up your BIOS? You should be configuring everything manually...don't rely on the default settings. And if you've never updated the BIOS on that board, you may wanna check the ABIT website to what what's available & what improvements/fixes were made in the most recent version. Also, make sure your HSF is properly installed...did you check temps?

the ram is DDR400/PC3200. i've configured the bios using several guides on the net. temps seem ok & i've installed latest bios vers. HSF is secure. i haven't upgraded the power supply in a while. i'll do this and see what happens..

run memtest from floppy and loop it a few times to see if you have any errors. try it with one stick and then the other and then both http://www.memtest86.com/ since you have 2 brands of ram they may be running at different latencys i have elixir ram 2x 512 and they run at 2.5-3-3-8 with no problems i would check the wattage on the psu i got a 400watt one here on a 3200 but i need a 640 at least due to sata etc. im running under stock until i can buy a new one. check this page out http://www.extreme.outervision.com/... will help you find out what wattage you need roughly.