Johnw - I don't have a minidumps foler (or are you just pulling my leg?). Chuck2 - I should have mentioned that I did that. Now, rather than restarting, it completely freezes and only a reset will get it going. After the reset there's no info about what happened in eventvwr.

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Sako549 - You're right, some of them are a little puffed up and a drop of some brown crusty stuff is on the Motherboard (I guess that's the paraffin). A few others just have a little bit of this brown stuff on top of them. Would this definitely be the problem everyone?

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This http://help.lockergnome.com/lofiversion/index.php/t18299.html talks about capacitors going bad. And has a nice JPG link for a picture of leaking capacitors, and that brown crusty stuff.

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Fantastic, thanks everyone for your help. For Johnw and anyone else that knows, I've been running HeavyLoad v2.0 since discovering it about an hour ago (thanks Johnw) and so far no restarts, however it's stopped crunching the HDD. The CPU usage is 100% constantly and the memory graph is at 100%. I also have a popup about Virtual Memory minimum too low. My question - is this all normal, and in light of the capacitor discovery, shouldn't all this activity have caused my PC to restart? or do the different capacitors look after different things and the faulty capacitor that manages my network connections and Internet is the only one playing up? I'm such a noob!! :) Thanks again.

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Here http://www.transmetazone.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=195 is a good long story, with plenty of pictures, about capacitors leaking their electrolyte.

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"The CPU usage is 100% constantly and the memory graph is at 100%" Is it still 100% after a reboot & HeavyLoad not in use. If so, what is using it? How many drives or partitions do you have? ============================== Disable Indexing Services http://www.tweakxp.com/tweakxp/display.asp?id=1335 http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/OptimizeXP.html Indexing services is a small program that hogs HUGE amounts of RAM and can often make a computer endlessly loud and noisy. This system process indexing and updates lists of the files on your system, so you can search for them quickly, but it's completely unnecessary. To disable it, go to the Control Panel and click Add or Remove Programs. Click the Add/Remove Window Components. Simply untick the Indexing services and click Next! ===================================== Clear virtual memory on shutdown. http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2003/2003-02-27.htm Windows does not normally clear or recreate the page file. On a heavily used system this can be both a security threat and performance drop. Enabling this setting will cause Windows to clear the page file whenever the system is shutdown. Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Local Security Policy > Security Settings > Local Policies > Security Options. Scroll down to "Shutdown: Clear Virtual Memory Pagefile". Right click and select properties then click "Enabled". ======================================== If your computer is NOT a laptop/notebook then you can stop Hibernate. Hibernation, reserves disk space equal to your RAM. http://www.tweaktown.com/document.php?dType=guide&dId=145&dPage=5 The mysterious hiberfil.sys http://www.softwarepatch.com/tips/hiberfil-sys-xp.html

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The Windoze XP IDE Transfer Mode Failback “Feature” & Fix http://users.bigpond.net.au/ninjaduck/itserviceduck/udma_fix/ UDMA à PIO | DUCK’S BLOG ======================================= Problems enabling DMA on IDE drives http://www.softwaretipsandtricks.com/windowsxp/articles/249/1/Problems-enabling-DMA-on-IDE-drives ====================================== IDE ATA and ATAPI disks use PIO mode after multiple time-out or CRC errors occur http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=817472 ==================================== DMA Mode for ATA/ATAPI Devices in Windows XP http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/tech/storage/IDE-DMA.mspx Enabling DMA in XP http://www.blackmaxpc.com/Guides/DMA.htm http://www.xtremepccentral.com/foru...9/2002/05/1/885 http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/tech/storage/IDE-DMA.asp http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=7625 http://www.optorite.com/manual/English/manual/dma.htm Problems enabling DMA in XP http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=6645 http://www.compguysinc.com/techweb/hardware/dma66.shtml ========================================= http://www.subvers.com/technobabble/html/tweaks/access.htm http://www.tweaktown.com/document.php?dType=guide&dId=145&dPage=3 Just like Windows 2000, Windows XP still fails to set the DMA mode correctly for the IDE device designated as the slaves on the primary IDE and secondary IDE channels. Most CD-ROMS are capable of supporting DMA mode, but the default in XP is still PIO. Setting it to DMA won't make your CD-ROM faster, but it will consume less CPU cycles. Here's how: Open the Device Manager. One way to do that is to right click on My Computer > Properties > Hardware > Device Manager. Expand "IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers" and double-click on "Primary IDE Channel". Under the "Advanced Settings" tab, check the "Device 1" setting. More than likely, your current transfer mode is set to PIO. Set it to "DMA if available". Repeat the step for the "Secondary IDE Channel" if you have devices attached to it. Reboot. Don't worry; devices that aren't capable of DMA mode will still work just fine. http://www.windowsxpatoz.com/cgi-bin/performance/index.cgi?answer=1036284156&id=1036282433 If the computer persists on having only PIO after reboot even though the hard drive is a flashing super-duper ATA133 and transfer mode set to “DMA if available”, then you have to do the following: Remove the primary device in the device manager and reboot!, now the harddrive should be running in DMA mode. Repeat on the secondary IDE channel if necessary.

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