A friend gave me his PC - as new, no problems at all. He installed my hard drive as a 2nd hard drive - no problems. Unfortunately, I accidentally spilled some tea near the PC, and it played up - heaps of lock-ups, and strange screens. I took it to local PC shop, and the guy did the following: -he checked motherboard - he said it is fine... still locked up, so I took it back... then -he said to reformat the 2nd hard drive - I did, still no success... then -he checked graphics cards and said it was damaged - he replaced it. The PC is working better, but there is still at least 1 lock-up per day - not even Ctrl-Alt-Del fixes it - the mouse and keyboard completely freeze. There is no pattern - sometimes it freezes during screen-saver, sometimes in MS-Outlook, and sometimes in Firefox. Any suggestions? I'm loath to take it back again to PC place, since it is quite heavy and I have a bad back, and he doesn't seem to do extensive testing. Thanks in advance.

Seems like an HDD issue.... I would go back to your friend and ask what he did. If he has some app's (Partion Magic for example) to diagnose....Check out.. Spilling liquid should not cause massive wierd probs like this.... Third party troubleshooting, like the PC guy (or me) is just a shot in the dark.... I hope this helps..... If not.....post back... I would like to help all I can :) Superyutz' Renderings Nottingham, MD. 21236 Tech Support for the Common Man

Hook a new Power supply to it and see if you still get lockups, you can also run memtest to check your RAM I would suggest testing it from a bootable memtest cd - You can find it here: http://www.memtest86.com/download.html If you get error, I would suggest to change RAM sticks Thanks for any input.

Another thing about the computer... it makes a funny sound every 10 seconds, a soft groaning sound, a bit like the sound of an accelerator in a car, but only lasts about 1 second, then goes away... then back after 10 seconds. My friend says it's nothing... is it?

Take a cover off and try and determine if it's the CPU fan making that noise. If it is, replace the fan. It could be stopping intermittently and causing the lockups.