Hi, I recently bought a new 400 watt power supply case, a abit nf7 motherboard, a amd barton 2500 cpu, 512megs of pc2700 ddrram and a geforce4 ti4200 video card. I put everything together and then put in my old harddrive, a 60gig wd, that already had win98 installed on it from my old computer. I booted and win98 loaded and then detected all the new hardware and began installing it, then half way thru the computer shut down and started to wail like a siren, dee doo dee doo. I finally had to unplug the pc to turn the noise off. I then pluged it back in and booted it and it continued to install the hardware under win98. after it finished it fully loaded win98 and i began to use the computer for the next few days without any problems. then just yesterday i decided to install winxp home edition and have a dual boot system. when it finally got to the part where it asks where do you want to install winxp, on which partition, the computer shut down and began wailing again with the siren like sound. i tried rebooting and it went right back to tje winxp installation process where it asks which drive to install windows to and it shut down again and had the same noise. so, what's going on, any ideas. the only thing i can think of is i might need a new cpu fan or make sure it's on there good with some thermal compound and also, i did forget to install on screw to hold the motherboard to the case, would this be causing a short or something? any help is greatly appreciated. by the way, bios is fully updated and the cmos was reset. thanks, chris.

Sounds like an overheating problem. Was that processor a retail or OEM? If OEM did you apply thermal paste? Did you reuse the old HS/fan? The paste or thermal pad is manditory. The HS/fan is probably undersized. The very first thing you should do when first starting up a new system is to enter the BIOS and monitor the temperatures for at least 5 min.

i thought it might be that but what throws me off is why i had it running in win98 for over an hour, but then i go to install winxp and it shuts down in less than a minute.