I suspected at first it may be bad memory but I swapped some good memory and it still freezes at random times. I also figured maybe it was a faulty power supply and the brand new one worked for a few hours and then it froze again. Lastly I figured maybe it wasn't getting enough cooling as the original HP case it was in didn't have a fan mounted on the CPU heatsink but above it in a panel on the case that swivels away from the case for removal, and it was mounted in a duct of some sort. I basically disassembled everything and mounted the motherboard in a new case with a larger space for things to breathe and it has a large fan mounted to the CPU, and 2 case fans. Stll freezes. Would this be a motherboard gone bad, and if so why would it work at all, and maybe is there some kind of BIOS setting that would cause this?

Tough one! Do you hear any clicks from the hard drive when it freezes? If you have an optical drive, try disconnecting it for a while, to see if it might be causing the problem. Try another video card, if you can. Do yourself a favor BACKUP!!!

I had a similar problem. I also changed PSU, RAM and case, I took out the CPU, re-coated it with thermal grease and I still get the problem. A change in motherboard is what sorted mine out. "PARIAH"[British.By.Birth] P4 2.6 HT Asrock P4VM800 M/B 1024mb DDR 400 80GB HDD ATI Radeon 9600 256mb

It may not be a hardware problem. Have you considered it may be a software problem? When did the problem start? Life is more painless for those who are brainless.

Jennifer I aquired this computer from a friend who was having this problem before me. So I guess it's been doing it for a while for them. I figured it was probably a software issue, but after a clean reformat and it still freezing I knew there was more to it. Ham, I don't even have any optical drives hooked up at the moment and that was another way of me trying to troubleshoot this problem. No graphic cards either (integrated graphics on this board). When the freeze occurs, the hard drive never clicks or makes any noise, things just stop. I also never get a blue screen either which usually would mean there is a software or OS issue causing the freeze. Sometimes it can be as simple as clicking on a toolbar item and then it freezes. Weird thing is when things freeze it's like time stops and everything freezes completely. The monitor is a static image of exactly what was happening at the time of the freeze, if there is disk activity and the HDD light on the computer case is on, the light stays on. All the fans continue to spin, and there is no response with CTRL-ALT-DLT. On another thread someone said maybe the motherboard drivers may need to be installed and I never knew there were motherboard drivers to install as I have formatted and installed hard drives for years and never heard of having to install motherboard drivers. I would think on XP that would be a moot issue as XP loads most generic drivers anyways.

First thing to do is defaulting u'r bios setting.

Ok Hercule, I tried that already made no difference. If that means the Bios setup defaults, then yes I always do that with a new install. Any other suggestions?