I built my friend a pc last year and we appear to be having troubles with it the specification is as follows: AMD Athlon 2200+ 266FSB CPU W/Artic Silver Cooling And AMD Retail Heatsink Fan 768MB PC133 SDRAM (Branded) 60GB Hitachi Hard Drive NEC DVD + RW Optical Drive Samsung CD-RW/DVD Combo Optical Drive 3.5'' 1.44MB Floppy Drive Syntax SV266A Motherboard(Latest Bios) 64MB Geforce 4 MX 440 (Getting Upgraded To Geforce 3 TI 64MB Graphics Soon) Creative Soundblaster Live! 5.1 Sound Card 250W Standard Beige ATX Case The Problems are instability, slow at loading applications up, sometimes Windows won't boot or boot but starts with BSOD such as STOP messages. Windows XP SP2 Professional W/Updates Is Installed The Latest NVidia,Creative,Via 4 in 1 Chipset and other drivers are installed. There is no overheating in the Case the Case temp gets no hotter than 30c and the processor tops out at are 57c when on full load. Any help would be greatly appricated. I Got A Athlon 2200+ 512MB PC133 SDRAM 80Gb Hard Drive 64MB Geforce 3 TI500 Syntax SV266A 2MBPS Broadband Windows XP MCE 2005

has it always had this problem or did it just start recently? if it just started happening, what was the last thing changed (hardware or software) before this happened? are you getting an error message with the BSOD? and if so, what it is? if the error message flashes quickly then reboots, change the setting in system properties control panel and uncheck "automatically restart" when system shuts down Don't put a question here? lol

Nvidia drives have been a problem for me, also. I can't identify what the problem is. I've come to the conclusion that they don't know what they're doing. (The drivers right on the MB CD don't work right, and I just got an update that IMMEDIATELY crashed.) I don't have an answer for you, but you're not alone.

The latest updates are not always the best, they are just the latest. What about that 250 w. power supply? Do we know it to be good? Have you checked the RAM? What specifically are the error messages?

Yes I would also suspect the power supply for a start - the ones supplied in cheap cases are usually under-powered & often don't have any protection should they blow. I have also wound back the NVidia drivers on my fx5200 as the latest ones caused instability problems. "I know that I'm mad, I've always been mad"

Hi GXi man & johnr have spotted the weakest element of your pc the psu , probably quite tired by now :O ,your wattage requirements are approx 260 watts hence could be its telling you its about to retire. http://www.jscustompcs.com/power_supply/Power_Supply_Calculator.php?cmd=AMD when was the last time a harddrive spring clean was done? www.ccleaner.com defrag and spyware check? http://www.safer-networking.org/ just worth running peridically anyway. regards

i can't believe i didn't see that..lol yes your PSU is a major problem, 250 watts even in a good brand is underpowered for an AthlonXP system. A bad PSU is not responsible for the slow-ness (i just made that word up), but it will cause BSOD's Don't put a question here? lol