about a month ago my pc started locking up completely. at first it was only while playing games but now it locks up usually when downloading for a while or watching a video or graphics intensive web pages for an hour or so. when i say lock up i mean there's no response from the mouse cursor or keyboard and i have to restart. also, when i restart it never restarts properly. it usually hangs at certain points and i have to leave my computer off for a while before it will start up right through to loading windows. and sometimes when i shut down the computer it doesn't power off. i thought it might be a ram problem so i bought new ram and had it installed by the store for me but now it's worse as i described above. i hope i've given enough information to be helpful. i'm really not sure what the problem could be. i can't do virus scans or adware/spyware scans or i get lock ups. i'd appreciate any help or insight i can get. Sean

The first question is what maintenance do you do? Delete temp files, defrag, system file checker? You only have 512mb of RAM which is pretty small for any game playing or graphic work. I am running 3.5gb of RAM and get slow downs if I have been using video or graphics program for any length of time. Your freezeups may be hardware related as well. Overheating because a fan is going out processor will shutdown to protect unit, thus a freeze.