Hey folks. Just recently I sold and installed a hard drive to a couple of people (same drive). Oddly, they are now having the same trouble. When they try to connect to the internet via their dial-up connections, their computers freeze to the point that they have to reset them to start them again. Even when they hit Alt Ctrl Del, the Task Manager doesn't come up. Any idea whats going on? They both have XP.

Well, since none of us was leaning over your shoulder when you installed these drives we have little chance of telling if anything you did or did not do is causing the problem. By "sold and installed a hard drive" does this mean you installed the operating system on these drives? Or did you just instal them as slave storage? or did you simply instal the drives and the customers installed their own operating systems. Are the two systems you installed these drives into the same? Both obviously have dialup modems. What brand harddrive and what size? What spec systems were they installed into? Do the systems have SP1 or 2 installed? Of course it may be that the fact they are using drives you supplied is simply co-incidence and they both have become infected with similar virus/worms/spyware that is clogging up their systems. You need to look at each system individually and start with making sure there is no form of virus/adware/spyware. Look in devicemanager to see if there are any conflicts particularly regarding their modems. Look for driver updates. Run chkdisk and defrag. Empty out temporary internet files. There are so many possibilities given the limited information you have supplied that further suggestions are pointless until you try some things and eliminate some of the possibilities. Look in Eventlogs to see if there are any error messages. I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

Ok, sorry about that, I guess I assume WAY too much and should be a little more specific. One of these systems now has Windows XP Home SP2 (which I installed) and the other has Windows 98 (again, I installed it). The drives are both Seagate 80GB (Spinpoint P Series, if I recall accurately). One of these individuals bought their computer back into me and I checked it for viruses using Norton and Housecall and didn't find anything. The only possible conflict that might be taking place on this computer is with the onboard video that I still need to figure out how to disable since its not being used. The BIOS is very strange, I might add lol.