System: 1.2 Ghz AMD Athlon ASUS A7V133 1004 PC-133 512 MB SDRAM (2 X 256MB DIMM) 60 MB ATA100 IBM (master) 30 MB ATA66 Seagate (slave) Voodoo 4 Plextor CDR/W Pioneer DVD SB Live! 5.1 3Com NIC 2 fans, 1 intake and 1 exhaust (cooler master) OS: Dual Boot win2k pro SP2 and WinME. (on different partitions on the IBM drive. Cannot reformat 30 GB b/c it is full of my old files) What I've done so far: 1. installed latest drivers 2. installed Win2k SP2 3. installed Windows Media Player 7.1 4. installed IE 5.5 Problems: WinME: 1. won't shut down. will restart computer but won't turn it off. Win2k: 1. Turns off by itself. 2. BSOD but turns off too fast before I could read it. 3. Overall a very unstable system. Questions: 1. on my ASUS MB, I am using DIMM 2 and 3 with 256MB each. DIMM 1 is not used because the latch is broken. Does it matter where you put the memory? 2. Are there any known conflicts among the components I have? 3. Is there a way to test how good DIMM's are? 4. Is a 300W PS enough to power all the components I have? 5. Is there a way to test actual CPU speed?

first of all have you tried uninstalling one of the operating systems to see if your problem goes away. i have me and 2k on my computer and have had no problems.the memory really should be in the dimm1 slot put it in there and try.have you tried to overclock because that can cause problems all by itself if you dont know what youre doing.the power supply is alright for what you have. you can also get a cpu checker at analog x.com

Thanks for the response team south. I am not overclocking so I don't think this is an issue. But just to make sure, I made it run at 900Mhz (9.0X100) instead of 1.2 Ghz(9.0X133) and ran into the same problems. I can't put the memory on the dimm1 slot because the right latch is broken. I originally just had win2k running but kept running into BSOD. I repartitioned the drive and installed Win ME then installed Win2k. I uninstalled all creative labs software, adaptec and plextor and this seem to eliminate the random shutdown on Win2k. I am suspecting it's more of a software combo problem rather than hardware issues. I also uninstalled the creative labs software from Win ME and can now shut down cleanly.

are you sure you have all the updated drivers.i have creative soundblater 5.1 platnium. no problems and i have adaptec easy creator5 no problems. install the software back in 1 at a time but put the cd-r in first see what causes the conflict

1. New motherboards do not care what slots you use for ram. Exceptions are the proprietary ram types like Rambus ram. Since your running an Athlon its not an issue. 2.For WinME no issues. For Win2k check the hardware compatability web site at Microsoft.com and do not go by what someone told you...the site is offical...everything else is opinion. 3. Set your motherboard to do the long power on test (it runs the ram test 3 times). As long as your board is set to the correct timing (ie, CAS3 or CAS2 depending on ram) and the power up test passes you should be fine. 4.Plenty of power. 5. CPUZ downloadable from the web for free. Do a search on google.