I have been having problems getting Windows XP to boot without problems. I started having these problems a few months ago. My machine either restarts by itself or completely locks up several times before booting successfully. Each time the lock-up occurs a bit farther into the boot process, until it finally boots without problems. Safe-mode startup is also prone to these boot problems. I recently decided to replace my harddrive as I had planned on upgrading it anyway. With the new harddrive, I replaced the power supply with a more powerful one. After the new harddrive was installed, I still had the same problem. (I completely removed the old one, so there is only one harddrive installed). I even tried replacing the system battery, but that did not solve the problem either. I am thinking it is not hardware related as I am not experiencing any problems once my machine has successfully booted. Does anyone have any advice? Thanks...

What motherboard do you have and what version is it?

Could be a problem with the motherboards power distribution.

It's an MSI Athlon Motherboard that supports the AMD Athlon 950 mhz processor.