I am in the process of building a new system and have been having some difficulties. I've been using the heatsink Intel provided with a P4 1.8, but have had to mount and remove it a number of times. Before I mounted it the the third time I put down some heatsink compound because the thermal interface material that came on the heatsink looked damaged. After I got the system up, configured the BIOS and installed the OS, the system froze. Now, I can't get it to boot - it either freezes right after power up, or it resets itself. I've removed the mobo from the case, reseated the RAM, removed the battery, flashed the ROMs and then tried reseating the CPU and putting down more heatsink compound, but this seemed to make it worse. Any suggestion? Is this a heat-related problem as I suspect? Should I upgrade from a silicon-based compound to something else?

dont know how much this helps but, the "thermal interface material" on the Intel heatsink is a thermal pad. In short, they suck. You should make sure to remove is completely and carefully (with rubbing alcohol and if you're using a razor - be sure not to scratch the heatsink). Then apply the thermal grease/compound. But use only a light coating to help conduct the heat between the chip and heatsink, otherwise too much will insulate the heat. If you suspect overheating is causing your instability, you should first download a motherboard monitor utility and get a temp reading on your CPU and motherboard. But if you're now having problems with a cold boot, then heat may not be the culprit. How careful were you with mounting and unmounting the heatsink? Hope you didn't scrape the board or bend the surrounding transistors. I upgraded recently to a DragonOrb3 heatsink and it is one-big-heavy-mother of a heatsink. My motherboard was flexing as I pushed down to clamp on the heatsink. Glad I only had to do it once. I hear that some heatsink mounting mishaps can crack an Athlon CPU, but looks like you got a lot of troubleshooting ahead of you.

The misshapened heat sink material is bothersome. Whatever forces caused the dings in the compound may have chipped the CPU. I�ve done it personally with an Athlon. My computer�s symptoms were very similar to yours. On close inspection of my CPU with a bright light and a magnifying glass there were obvious chips along the edges. If you are going to do this, take a close look at the pins too and make sure none of them are bent. Fortunately for me, my vendor (Royal Computer) replaced my CPU. I don�t know much about the shape of a P4 so I don�t know how hard (or easy) it would be to do the same. If you�ve got a buddy or local shop that can lend you a CPU, try it. I found that the generic heat sink paste works well and I haven�t read anything yet that convinces me that Arctic Silver is tremendously superior. That is just my opinion. I do know that the stuff they use on the Space Shuttle is just a variant of the generic stuff (made by Dow Corning) that has been created with a different solvent base so it won�t vaporize in a vacuum and fog up lens etc. in the Shuttle or the Hubbard Telescope. Good luck and please post back your progress!

i could be wrong but it sound like you have irq conflict. if your already have devices installed like an pci ide card etc. try removing all da cards and reinstall ur os. if it works fine then place da device back but change the order of where u put ur devices