I have a 3 or 4 year old computer which ran pretty well up until a month ago or so. It has the following. An ASUS CUSL-2 motherboard, 256MB RAM (1 Micron, 1 Corsair), P3 1GHz 133Mhz Processor and a Maxtor Diamond Max 45 Ultra 100, 7200RPM 30.7GB hardrive. Cards include an ethernet card, and ATI Expert 2000 Pro 32 MB Video Card and a Turtle Beach Riviera Sound Card. Here is the history. For about 1.5 years I was internetless and the computer worked fine, maybe even better than newer ones I had used. Then, I signed on to the internet again. I immediately did the following, installed Norton and downloaded all the critical updates and service packs for 2000 (I was at SP2). Immediately after doing this my computer started to hang when I started it up, right after the preparing network connections screen. If I ctrl+alt+del and hit restart it would usually boot up the second time. Then I noticed my original sound card wasn't working (Phillips Acoustic Edge 5.1) which had always given me problems, so I played around with different PCI slots and at one point found my computer rejecting all hardware and one DIMM of memory. After that happened, I reinstalled everything and went for the Turtle Beach card. It didn't install flawlessly, but finally the soundcard did load, but the response from Media Player isn't to good. I also had some trouble re-installing the graphics card. I finally got it running so I left it alone and I just deal with the double sometimes triple restarts to get it to boot up. Thing is it was fine a month ago. I do have adequate disk space (10GB free), but I have a good amount of software loaded (Photoshop, Office, Cakewalk, Illustrator, Corel and other random stuff). I was thinking it just might not have the RAM to boot up, but then I keep thinking how it was fine a month ago. I'm somewhat leaning towards the Service Packs as the culprits, but I really have no idea. Any help at all would be wonderful. I've read about updating my BIOS (not sure how) but I have also read where people say not to. Thanks for any and all information. Fred.

Did you reinstall the OS also? You could run a repair and see what happens. Insert your W2K CD. If it loads and displays on the screen click Exit. Then go to Start, Run, type sfc /scannow ,click OK. The program will check for corrupted files and reinstall them. Unfortunately it does not provide a report. If that does not work then your next step would be a repair using the Win2K CD but you will need to change the booting order of your computer beforehand. When you start up your computer, press the Delete key (sometimes it is F2 or F5) for the BIOS screen to appear. There you will be able to change the booting sequence to CDROM being first. Save and reboot. During the boot you will need to press a key so that it boots of the W2K CD. When choices appear as Install, Repair etc. Choose Repair, then Fast. When finished allow it to reboot to Windows and see if your problem has been resolved. Also, download aida32 from http://www.majorgeeks.com/download181.html and run it. It is a diagnostic tool which will give you a lot of information about your computer.